How could he leave this beach, this girl he had fallen in love with, in the hands of a dark jinn? Despite himself, the sultan called for a white horse; despite himself he rode it across impure lands. The sun was setting by the time he found the girl, still dancing, her feet bleeding from wounds, her hair thorns and nettle. Off the ground he picked her; by his side he sat her, on the white horse.
Don’t wake my girl before the dance has finished, the jinn cried, with her lips.
* * *
“But he woke her,” Elif said, anticipating the end of the story.
“Where Murad left the dead girl lying,” I said, “today there stands a white boulder. Wind and water have undercut it and shaped it to look like a lone tree.”
I pulled out a postcard — one that Dyado Dacho had given me, old and wrinkled as it was — and shoved it in Elif’s hands.
“I can’t see anything,” she said, and lit a lighter for only a moment. Though of course, a moment would have been plenty for the hay around us to catch on fire.
“A stone tree on a black beach,” I said. That’s what the postcard was showing.
“I’ve heard of it,” Elif said. “Byal Kamak. A tiny village.”
“Where a mighty river flows into the Black Sea.”
“The Veleka River!” she said, perhaps more loudly than she had to.
“Where the sand is black with silt from the river.”
“Dear God,” she whispered. “Where the nestinari settled after they left Klisura!”
NINE
I BELIEVE OUR PLAN was doomed from the very beginning. And I believe we all knew it. We weren’t stupid. So wrote Captain Kosta — leader of the Strandjan rebels against the Ottoman armies. Or at least, so I’d read in Grandpa’s papers. The poor captain had thrown himself in the enemy’s jaws not because he had expected to crush them. He had done so because, in his own words, to sit still and do nothing would bring a defeat greater and more shameful. And so, I suppose, our plan too was doomed from the very beginning. And I suppose we too knew it.
What the plan consisted of was fairly simple. On the afternoon of May 21, the feast day of Saints Constantine and Elena, Dyado Dacho would wait for the bus at the square. “I have come to collect what you owe me,” he’d tell the driver, and when the driver tried to wriggle out of paying, the old man would make him a tempting offer. “Three out of five. Double or nothing.” So, seeing how there was a lot worse he could be doing than playing some backgammon, the driver would shut off the engine, and, leaving the keys in the ignition, where he always left them, he’d follow Dyado Dacho to the Pasha Café. Three out of five would soon turn into four out of seven, and so would the glasses of mint and mastika. And as these things so often happened, before too long the two of them would find themselves locked in and peacefully snoring on the bench in the corner.
Night would have fallen over Klisura. The imam would call from the minaret for the day’s final prayer, Elif’s cue to lead Aysha down to the square. Baba Mina and I would be waiting already. We’d climb on the bus, start the engine, and drive eastward — thirty kilometers to the village of Byal Kamak. All this under the premise that by the stone tree, where the Veleka entered the Black Sea, there would be nestinari dancing.
It’s not courage that drives us. It’s not madness. It’s hunger for freedom. This Captain Kosta had written, a hundred years before me, and this I was repeating now on the square, behind the unlocked bus, with Baba Mina beside me. Night had fallen. The driver had eaten up Dyado Dacho’s bait, hook, line, fishing rod, and all. The imam was singing. But there was no sign of Elif and Aysha.
“Are you cold, Grandma?” I whispered, then took off my jacket and covered her shoulders.
“I’ll get warm soon, my boy,” she answered. “Saint Kosta will warm me up.”
The imam’s voice flowed out of Klisura, across the hills, and the village was quiet. A dog barked far in the distance and a stork swooped down from the roof of the municipal building and spun a wheel overhead. Baba Mina clasped my waist like a frightened child.
“Don’t let him take me,” she whispered. “The black stork.” Whether the stork was really black or only appeared to be, I couldn’t tell. Nor did I have time to investigate. The metal ropes of the bridge creaked in the darkness, and footsteps echoed over the noise of the river fattened on rain. A silhouette took shape before us. And then another. And when I saw a third shape approaching, my heart leapt and I thought of running.
“It’s over,” I think I told Baba Mina, and in her fear she squeezed my waist harder.
But then we heard Elif speaking. The plan, she told us, had changed a little. And soon I recognized her and Aysha and beside them their mother.
TEN
THEN THE KEY WAS NOT IN THE IGNITION.
“Of course I’m certain,” I cried from the driver’s seat. “I’m groping the ignition and the key isn’t in it.” It was so dark inside the bus that I saw nothing but dim shapes. Baba Mina rocked and mumbled behind me, and her seat creaked with every rock and mumble. Aysha said something and then her mother cried, “There, he’s coming. He’s found us!” but it was only a stork flying across the square and so she spat in her shirt to chase away the fear.
A wave of irritation washed over me. After all, I had been the one to mock the driver for keeping the key in the ignition. Now, as a reaction, he’d either taken it with him, which I doubted, considering how afraid he was of losing it when drunk, or hidden it somewhere in the cabin. So we searched, in the flame of Elif’s lighter. A pair of oversized green dice hung from the rearview mirror, so I shook them, hopeful, but nothing rattled inside. Every so often, the flame burned Elif’s thumb and we sat in darkness while she blew on the flint wheel to cool it. Then there was light for a few more seconds.
“Piece-of-shit lighter,” she cursed at one point. “We’ll run out of gas soon.”
A tiny icon of the Virgin Mary was taped to the dashboard, so I untaped it and looked for the key on its back. A faded picture of long-haired Hristo Stoichkov in his Barcelona jersey. A clipping of Lepa Brena and a green pine tree that stank of cigarette smoke and naphtha. And then, just when Elif flicked on the light one final time before the gas ran out, I saw it — a dark outline, only faintly showing behind a glorious picture. Samantha Fox, patron saint of all bus drivers from my childhood. And tucked behind her magnificent bosom — the key to our freedom.
* * *
That I could drive the bus came as a surprise to Elif. So I told her: my father had taught me how to drive stick shift; for him, no real man drove automatic. And if she didn’t mind, this time I wanted to be the one to drive us. The plan was mine and I intended—
“Watch the road!” she yelped behind me, though I had taken the turn quite nicely. We were crossing a patch of eroded pavement and that’s why the bus rattled. But the farther away from Klisura we drove, the smoother the road became; the less wild the oaks on both sides, the softer the wind that shook them.
“Isn’t that something,” Elif sneered, because she too had noticed the world grow less feral around us. I wondered if the others too would notice. Baba Mina rocked and mumbled and so did Aysha, oblivious to the outside, every now and then stopping to synchronize her rocking with the old woman’s. But Elif’s mother was paying attention. Of that I was certain, though she sat in her seat as still as a stone tree.