“Grandma Mina?” I said. So she was the hag Elif had told me about? The one who’d inspected the girls, in Elif’s yard, munching one clove of garlic after another? The poor old woman in black I’d seen at the bus station, whose swollen feet her husband had massaged? How many times had we come back from their house with buckets of fertilizer for our yard? How many times had she treated us to mint tea and stale cookies? Baba Mina, our very own Tituba.
“I know I could have saved them,” Grandpa said, then returned the article to the folder and piled on top of it book after book. Watching him, I was reminded of something I’d learned in school, one of the cruel ways in which the witches of Salem had been put to death — the victim was crushed with stones, but gradually, each new rock carefully placed atop the one before until their collective weight grew unbearable, fatal.
“If only I’d gone with their father. I would have recognized they weren’t acting. I would’ve made him call a doctor.”
“Grandpa,” I began, but stopped. What could I say to make him feel better? I reached across the desk and covered his hand, cold, like a stone. But mine was warm.
“So this explains the fire dancers, then? Saint Kosta’s madness?”
He shook his head. “It explains what’s happening in the village now. This ugly farce. But the fire dancers—” He stopped for a moment and his eyes drifted across the room as if he could see them, one after the other, jumping among the desks and vanishing into the walls. “They all went away, my boy. What good is it to seek them? They are no more.”
“Were you really their leader?”
“I was a caretaker, yes. Never a leader.”
“And who’s to care for Aysha and the other girls? Who’s to help them?”
He pulled his hand away from mine.
“In the Salem trials,” he said, “they would blindfold the accused witch and bring her before her accuser, the so-called victim, thrashing in idiotic fits. And they would force the witch to touch the victim, who then conveniently grew calm at once. You see, they’d say, the touch of the guilty hand caused the venom to rush back to the witch from whom it’d come. My boy,” he said, and stood up in the gloom, “I don’t want that venom back in my blood.”
SIX
THE UNTHINKABLE HAD HAPPENED: the rain had stopped. I lay in bed, my ears ringing, and listened to a thousand noises that seemed so new — the scurrying of mice in the attic, the buzzing of crickets in the yard, the flapping of stork wings, and the rushing of water down the road, down the hills where trees rustled with the wind. I’d begun to compose a letter in my head — to no one in particular — hoping to give my thoughts some order. But my head was an oven into which someone was pumping gas and any minute now the spark would flash — I must help Aysha, I reasoned, because helping her was the decent thing to do. Because it was barbaric to watch the torture of a child and not interfere. Because if I helped Aysha, Elif would thank me. Elif would love me if I helped the little girl.
“What you said earlier, do you believe it?”
Grandpa spoke from the threshold. In the light of the oil lamp he carried, his face burned like a wick; his shadow flowed behind him like a river and though he was old and wrinkled I thought of Lada, the goddess of youth and beauty, and then, once more, of Elif.
“Do you really believe I value land more than people? That I choose not to help the girls because of their father?”
“I’m a baker’s shovel, Grandpa,” I told him, only half as a joke. I could turn this way or that depending on whose hands held me. One moment I believed one thing, the next another. But I’m not sure he heard me.
“I first came to teach in Klisura when I was thirty-three,” he said, and, cradling the lamp in his arthritic hands, he sat at the foot of my bed. “Right from my first day here, one predicament became very clear: there was no school. So I built it. And then another: there were no students. So I set forth to find them. I still remember two little twin boys. Lived up a hill with their father. Shepherds. I found them outside their hut, washing sheep bells in a trough of milk. So the bells might sing more sweetly, they told me. I sat in the grass and watched them, two boys and their father, dip bell after bell in yellow milk. I didn’t ask them where their mother was. The sun was setting when they hung the bells to dry across a wooden framework behind the hut. The father picked up his boys, one in each hand, and let them shake the framework. The bells rang and their ringing rolled down the hill and up another where other shepherds rang other bells. Soon the whole Strandja was ringing, as far south as Turkey and even Greece.
“My boy,” Grandpa said, staring into the fire locked behind the glass, “an old man’s mind is a mountain, each memory a milk-washed bell. It’s true, God holds the future, which is uncertain and unknown, so let him hold it. But the old man holds the past. The past is certain. No god can summon it before him and rearrange it at his will. The old man can. An old man walks hill to hill and rings the bells, and bids to appear in their sound the long-gone days — a day from fifty years back as loud as another not even a fortnight old. And so the gods grow jealous of the old man. They hold the Cup of Lethe to his thirsty lips. Tempted, he drinks. His feet grow weak and then he limps from hill to hill. His feet give way. Gone is the old man’s strength to ring the bells.
“It’s been too long a silence,” Grandpa said, and closed his eyes. “I want to shake the wooden frame. I want my head to ring, from hill to hill across the Strandja.”
His eyes were muddy when he blinked them open, the kind of mud I’d learned to fear.
“Grandpa,” I said, “lie down. It was a hard day. Get some rest.”
But he cradled the lamp and the fire and when he looked my way I knew it wasn’t me he was seeing.
“I was seventeen that spring,” he said. “May 1944. It had been a bad winter, so bad the Danube froze in places and a fever crawled in across the ice from Romania.”
When the ice melted, the fever spread. Left and right people were burning. Children and women began to die. Whole families fled to seek shelter as far south as the Balkan Mountains. One dawn, Grandpa’s cousin — he was a year older — came to his house, panting. “Pull up your britches,” he cried, “and run with me to the square. They’re recruiting men for heroic business.” The elders from their village had met the elders from two others. They had decided to assemble a band of kalushari and send them from one house to another to chase the fever back whence it had come. When his cousin said kalushari, Grandpa’s heart leapt like a kid goat. Had he not seen them as a little boy, passing outside his grandfather’s house one morning on their way to cure the sick? Men like mountains. Bells on their sandals to raise a proper ruckus and scare the demons off. Their britches embroidered with silver and those silver threads flashing like bolts of lightning. Their shirts white like goose feathers, and on their chests bloodred kerchiefs like flapping wings. Daggers in their sashes, sabers and sickles in their hands, and sharpened cudgels with their bases shod in iron. Their eyes spilling fire, their jaws clenched so hard you could hear the bone crunching. And fresh herbs on their fur caps — smelling so sweet your eyes watered. One man walking in the steps of the other, grave and quiet, greeting no one and speaking to no one, not even to the little boy, running behind them. Sickness chasers, death hunters. And did Grandpa not remember how the maidens had watched them, misty-eyed, their long lashes flittering so quickly they raised the dust off the road in thick puffs? Filling their nostrils with the smell of the fresh herbs, with the men’s sweat, licking and biting their red lips? And their hearts thrashing so hard under their plump bosoms that even he, the little boy, had heard their knocking and taken fright, though with pleasure?