Was it footsteps I heard on the other side or a voice calling? I couldn’t be certain. So I knocked harder and then the door opened and Dyado Dacho stood before me.
“Good evening, Dyado,” I greeted. “I’ve come to see Baba Mina.”
All day before this I had been restless. And Grandpa had taken notice.
“I don’t know what you’re up to,” he’d told me at dinner, “but I’ll tell you this much: don’t do it. Not for your own sake, but for Elif and Aysha’s. When someone tells you his dog bites, you listen. You don’t lend the dog your throat to see how deep its teeth can sink in. So now I tell you — don’t test how deep the imam can bite us.”
After dinner, I washed the dishes and waited for Grandpa to finish his smoke, say goodnight, and retreat to his room. Then I climbed out my window, thumped into the cassis bush underneath it like a sack of crab apples, and limped across the yard, down the road, and to our neighbors’.
“It’s me, Grandpa, the American boy,” I told Dyado Dacho now from the threshold, and he raised the oil lamp to see me better. The light flickered, almost went out with the wind, and he pulled it back fearfully, as if he wouldn’t know how to relight the fire once he’d lost it.
“I’ve come alone,” I told him. “Grandpa went to bed already.”
I almost saw his mustache droop in disappointment, and for a moment I thought he’d shoo me away. But he coughed up a Come in now, hurry! with the rasp of someone who hadn’t spoken in many hours, and slammed the door shut behind me.
The noise of the world shattered into its component parts. I could hear distinctly the grains of sand from the road knocking outside like knuckles, Dyado Dacho’s stuffed nose whistling, and my heart beating right in my ears.
“Goes to bed with the chickens and hides like a chicken,” Dyado Dacho said of Grandpa, and led me down a narrow hallway. “Maybe he’ll start laying eggs soon. But I’d hide too if I played backgammon as lousy as he plays it. If I lost all my bets and never paid up.”
“Does he owe you money?” I managed, following closely. The old man barked, coughed, laughed — whatever that noise he made was really.
“I don’t rightly remember. But don’t you dare tell him!”
The corridor seemed to grow narrower, the planks at our feet louder in their creaking. The deeper into the house we waded, the more the smells of naphthalene and mold thickened. The mold, I’d come to realize on a previous visit, was from the house, its own smell; the naphthalene was from Dyado Dacho. In every pocket of his wool jacket he kept a mothball and he bragged boldly that he hadn’t seen a moth in thirty years. “Not since the devils ate up my best suit,” he’d told me. His only suit. The one in which he’d gotten married. The one in which, he’d hoped, one day he would be buried. “Some people declare war on world famine,” he’d told me on one occasion, “but I can’t be that noble. I’ve declared war on the moth devils. And I aim to win it.”
The room we entered was so hot, so stuffy the heat rushed at me like a bird fleeing its broken cage. A hefty fire burned in the fireplace and stretched Baba Mina’s shadow gigantic against one wall. But she was a tiny thing in her chair, close by the fire, and she did not turn to see who it was that had entered. She was mumbling under her breath — words I had no chance of catching — and metal knocked on metal so crisply that for a moment I thought it was two knives she sharpened.
“She’s been knitting for a week without stopping,” Dyado Dacho said, and went to adjust the blanket — perfectly preserved from the moth devils — that covered her shoulders. “It keeps her busy.”
Then he called her. “Grandma, the teacher’s boy has come to see you.” But the needles clattered so ferociously now, they overpowered even her mumble.
“Grandma,” I said, and stepped closer. It was then that she looked up — her face flushed, but not a single droplet of sweat glistening in the light of the fire and her eyes shiny like a fox’s.
“Ah, the teacher’s boy.” She smiled kindly. “The American.”
I sat in the chair across from her, a chair Dyado Dacho offered before limping to his spot in the corner, farthest away from the heat of the fire. He took a sweater out of a sack at his feet and began to unravel it, pulling the strand from one sleeve and piling up the yarn in his lap.
“What are you knitting, Grandma?” I asked, for her needles had gone back to clicking.
“It doesn’t matter,” she told me. “When I’m done Dyado Dacho unknits it. Ah, my boy, I wish I too were a sweater. I wish God could reknit me young as I was back in those days.”
Half my face was on fire and the other was catching it and sweat ran into my eyes and hurt them.
“Listen, Grandma, I’ve come to ask you about the nestinari.”
Some time passed before she answered, so I wasn’t sure she’d heard me. Only Dyado Dacho grunted in his corner. But then the clicking of the needles slowed down a little and I could see that she struggled to loop the yarn a few times.
“My sweet boy, don’t ask me. My feet are colder than dead bones, but when I knit, I barely notice. Yes,” she mumbled under her nose, “I barely notice,” and wrapped herself more tightly in the blanket.
“Forty years ago,” I said, “you and Dyado Dacho, and most everyone else in the village, moved to the city to seek a better life. Tell me, Grandma, where did the nestinari settle when they left Klisura?”
“Forty years,” Baba Mina repeated, as if for the first time stopping to consider just how much water had passed since then. “Back when I was little my daddy had a hundred white sheep. And each night we girls sat by the fire and spun wool as white as God’s beard and Mama knit us booties and jackets and hats with tassels. But Daddy is gone now,” she said, and the faint smile that had blossomed on her lips withered, “and so are the white sheep. Now all we have are old sweaters and Dyado Dacho unravels them, so I can knit from their yarn new ones. That’s where the nestinari went, my boy — after the white sheep. One by one, like unraveled sweaters. Yes, yes,” she said, and began to knit faster, “one by one, like white sheep.”
“Grandma,” I said, and for a long time didn’t know how to continue. “It’s Saint Kosta’s day tomorrow.” And by the way she looked at me — so gently, so helplessly — I understood, for the first time, that what I was doing was terribly cruel.
“It might be, my boy. But who’s counting.”
Sweat rolled down my back and itched me, and my tongue had swollen up so that every word rolled off crippled and clumsy. Or maybe it was just the ringing in my ears, the blood rushing, that muddied up all sound around me.
“There is a sick girl across the river, Grandma, the imam’s daughter, and I’d like to help her. I’d like to take her to where the nestinari are dancing so they can cure her.”
“And how will you do that?” Dyado Dacho sneered suddenly in his corner. “The girl’s locked up and her father guards her.”
“Elif will help me.”
“And when she helps you, how will you get to where the nestinari are dancing?”
“In her father’s Lada. We’ll steal it.”
“Steal it?” He laughed and yanked on the yarn so hard almost a third of a sleeve unraveled. “He dismembered it, the crazy fool. The whole café went to see how he gutted it. Slashed the tires, cut the wires, threw out the battery in the garbage. He was that mad with fury.”
With each word I could feel my heart sinking, my plan unraveling like an old sweater. It was hopeless then and like Elif had told me — there was no way out of Klisura. The logs crackled in the fire, the needles were clicking, and I was ready to ask forgiveness and scurry back home to my grandfather, when Dyado Dacho stopped me.