“No girl can resist the kalushari,” his cousin told him, as if Grandpa didn’t know this already, and they flew off to the square. “If they choose me,” his cousin said, “I’m taking Kera. So what if she’s getting married? And that Sevda you’ve been pining over, she’ll kiss your feet if they choose you.”
“It’s true, my boy,” Grandpa said sweetly. “She was a beautiful girl, my Sevda. Lovely smile, eyes, bosom. But she didn’t want me. ‘Look at yourself,’ she’d say, and her friends would giggle. ‘My grandmother’s mustache is thicker than the moss on your lip. A peach’s moss is thicker. Grow a beard, man up a little. Then come again to ask me.’”
That morning all the boys from Grandpa’s village gathered on the square. Only those older ones, who had run up to the woods with the Communist partisans, only they were missing. And the girls too came that morning, those devils, to ogle them. There was his cousin’s Kera, though she was getting married, and there was his sweet, dear Sevda, eating a fresh pretzel and licking her red lips.
The boys formed a long line, shoulder to shoulder, and this giant, this colossus of a man, stood before them. His britches were embroidered with silver; his shirt was whiter than snowdrop petals. So white, Grandpa’s eyes hurt to watch him. Geranium, dock, and wormwood adorned the giant’s fur cap, and in his hand he brandished a cudgel, sharpened like a spear, with bells on its top and its bottom cast in copper. Three times the giant smacked the cudgel on the ground to get their attention, and three times the cudgel sang, its bells ringing.
“I am the vatafin,” the colossus told them, “leader of the kalushari. My father was a vatafin, and my grandfather in Romania, he too was a vatafin. I’ve come here to choose six of you, muttonheads, the strongest, so we can go after the fever and wrestle her down, that serpent, and chop her three heads off.”
The village elders were there on the square and so was the mayor. The gendarme had come to see if this circus was perchance partisan-related. Back then the tsarists were awfully scared of the partisans and they could sense that a bad storm was brewing. Even the priest had showed up fuming. Godless pagans, he called the people, and waved his iron crucifix in the air; but the women chased him away, the righteous, for hadn’t he left their children dying?
Then the boys were given each a pick or a shovel. “Dig a pit,” the colossus ordered, and they dug a hole, one meter deep and five meters long, just like he wanted. A cart arrived full of chopped wood, and they built a fire there in the pit and when the flames burst out like so many tongues of the plague-fever, the boys crossed themselves three times, slack in the knees with terror.
“Whatever you do,” his cousin whispered in Grandpa’s ear, “don’t shame yourself. The women are watching.”
“My beautiful Sevda,” Grandpa said, and his eyes moved left, right, left, as if she were skipping lightly before him. “The Fever took her three months later. Her smile, eyes, bosom — food for the maggots. We really were muttonheads, my boy, on the square that morning, standing before a pit spitting fire. Fever slayers and death chasers. He-goats with their balls bursting with pride and desire.”
There, look, see the vatafin gripping his cudgel. See how he sprints to the pit, and pole-vaults it, right through the tall flames. His body — a steel blade, which the flames harden. Fever, he’s saying, bow low before me. You can’t scorch that which fire has scorched already.
One after the other, the boys take the cudgel, run to the pit, and try to vault it. One boy falls left, one falls right, one drops straight in the fire, and when the men pull him out his bottom is flaming. They beat the flames down with their fur caps, and the girls are laughing, pointing, and clapping.
“Poor soul, he’s done for,” his cousin tells Grandpa. And they both know it — the lame son of the miller will have a better chance of getting married than the boy with the charred bottom.
“Saint Elijah,” Grandpa’s cousin prays to his name saint when it’s his turn to hold the cudgel. “Don’t let some fire shame me.” And he runs, digs the pole in the deep pit, shoots his legs forward, and lands on the other side safely, the fifth boy to do so in twenty.
One more boy left to be chosen and it’s not even Grandpa’s turn to jump yet. So each time someone new takes the cudgel Grandpa prays to Saint Elijah. “Saint Elijah, you’re not my name saint, but if you let the fire pass me through, I’ll slay my grandfather’s rooster to give you kurban. Saint Elijah, if you make sweet Sevda love me, just once if you let me kiss those thick lips, I’ll slay my grandmother’s hens and chickens, the whole coop.”
Then this boy, older, almost twenty, short like a pea but a strong fellow, he took the cudgel and leapt over the pit and through the fire and that was that. The sixth boy had been chosen.
“No,” I cried, and threw away my blanket. There was no way this ended the story.
“From where I’m standing,” Grandpa said, and nodded, “I can see the vatafin and the six boys, on the other side of the pit, through a curtain of fire. And the fire flows upward and turns their shapes to liquid. So I say, ‘Saint Elijah, you just watch me.’ And I say it out loud, so everyone hears it.”
Muddy-eyed, Grandpa sprang up to his feet. Muddy-eyed, he looked about the room. He was there, on the square, a young boy ready to leap over the fire.
“Grandpa,” I whispered, “watch out for the oil lamp.” But he didn’t hear me.
“So I dig my heels down in the ground,” he almost shouted, and stomped the floor, “and I run like a hala and I leap over the pit and the tall flames — no cudgels, no sticks, no canes needed. You just watch me, Elijah, my arms wings and my feet carts of fire. Pull me down, Elijah, if you can. If you dare — stop me!”
“The lamp, Grandpa!” And when I pulled the lamp out of his hands he blinked, suddenly sober, and all the years came rushing back.
“So they took you with the kalushari?” I said, and threw a blanket on his shoulders.
“How could they not take me?”
“And did you give a kurban for Saint Elijah? Did you make Sevda love you and did you kiss her?”
“I gave him a kurban, my boy,” he said, and his voice fell lower.
Day after day, he gave the saint one offering after another. He slaughtered roosters and chicks, and lambs and cows even. He burned barns and houses. He was up in the woods by then, with the Communist fighters, three months after jumping the fire. And they were raiding hamlets and sheep pens, and their brains were aflame with this new fever. And only when his cousin came up to find him, only when he said “They’re burying Sevda tomorrow,” did Grandpa go back to the village. But he didn’t kiss her. They didn’t even let him open the coffin because of her sickness. And her father came to him when it was over, when the earth had been piled up black and steaming, and said, “Weren’t you with the kalushari? Why didn’t you save her?” And Grandpa told him, “You muttonhead, that’s all opium for the masses,” and couldn’t run fast enough back to his comrades, to give Elijah another kurban, bloodier this time so the saint would remember him by it forever.
What sadness overcame me to hear this. To picture my grandfather burning barns and houses. Raiding sheep pens, stealing lambs and fleeces. A Communist fighter. A bandit. Gone was the image of Captain Kosta, of the heroic rebel.