It was after this that a bagpipe cut the night from throat to navel. A drum pounded to silence all others. From behind the stone tree came out the piper, the drummer, and the night turned day with all the cameras flashing.
Baba Mina tensed up beside me. “Vah, vah,” she whispered, but the whisper choked her. The piper stood on one side of the glowing circle, the drummer stopped on the other, and I wondered if this was what Murad the Godlike One had seen from his boat, six centuries back, like us waiting for women to come out dancing. Was this a tree or the girl with the white hair, or was it simply a boulder that winds and tides had disfigured?
The music flowed louder; the drum beat faster and my heart tried to keep up with its beating. In the light of the torches I could see a group of Japanese tourists toying with their cameras, the lenses so long they almost touched the embers. And a few kids with colorful hair swaying with the drum, waving their hands, and scratching green lines in the dark with their glow sticks.
“What the hell is he doing?” Elif whispered, but she didn’t have to point. On one side of the circle a shirtless man struggled to take off his left shoe. He’d already taken off the right one. Dirty sand glistened on his fat belly — like me, he too must have rolled on the ground a few times.
“Hey, back off,” someone cried, but the man wouldn’t listen. Before we knew it, he’d jumped in the embers and taken a few wobbly steps to the circle’s center. I still don’t know why the crowd started laughing. Maybe because his screams struck us as too high-pitched for such a big guy; maybe because he was calling for his mommy in Russian. Before long, he was out of the fire, but even after the men in the white shirts had carried him off to the darkness we could still hear him calling.
“That ought to teach him a lesson,” someone said behind us.
“Fat Russian bastard,” someone else said, laughing, and unexpectedly a wineskin was shoved into my hands.
“Take a sip, pass it forward,” a girl told me.
“What’s in it?”
“Divine nectar. What do you think’s in it?”
It was wine — thin and sour and tasting like leaves of geranium. I knew the taste; even in America my mother had insisted on adding the herb to our Christmas Eve compotes.
“Where did you get this?” Elif asked when I passed her the wineskin. But she didn’t wait for an answer. She gulped and the wine trickled down her chin and glistened.
Then her mother drank, then Baba Mina, and even Aysha took a few small sips.
“Easy now,” I told her, but someone laughed behind me.
“Let her have it. It’s better than milk and honey.”
For a while we watched the embers glowing and white smoke rising every time the rakes spread them thinner. Baba Mina took tiny steps in her place, and so did Aysha, keeping her eyes now on the old woman, now on the live coals. But her mother stood calmly and when the wineskin made it around the circle once more she took another deep gulp. She seemed victorious now, away from her husband, liberated if only for a few hours.
One by one, the men began to extinguish the torches. The music fell silent and we heard down the beach, where I imagined the Veleka entered the sea, the sound of another bagpipe, of another drum coming near. A shush spread through the crowd. Whispers and sighing. “They’re coming,” a Bulgarian said on one side. “The nestinari,” said a woman in English, and the word sounded so funny in a language that didn’t contain it.
The cameras flashed impatiently and out of their flashing the piper was first to appear. I’d never seen a bagpipe like this one: the head of the kid-goat from whose skin the bag was made preserved perfectly; the glassy eyes and black horns reflecting each new flash. Ahs and ohs moved the crowd and the cameras flashed even more greedily. The drummer followed and then the nestinari. Light chased darkness in a mad alternation and made their movements appear sharp and choppy. They cut through space like specters, now in one place, now in another. A young man carried a giant icon, half covered with a cloth as red as his sash. A young girl followed behind him, and in her steps another man and another girl, all carrying icons. Their bare feet kicked up sand as they weaved a circle around the spread embers.
“They’re so pretty,” Elif whispered, and again rested her head on my shoulder, this time without tears. The music picked up — the other bagpipe and drum had joined in. I saw that a large smile was stretching Aysha’s lips and she was clapping to keep rhythm. Her mother too was smiling and clapping and neither of them seemed even remotely interested in entering the fire. Could it be this easy, I wondered, to cure their sickness?
But Baba Mina wasn’t smiling. She’d stopped taking her tiny steps, and when she turned to me, her face twisted in fear. I understood that all I’d imagined — how she saw herself in the fire, young and pretty — all that was nothing but hogwash.
“Take me home, my boy,” she whispered, and reached for my hand, but couldn’t grab it.
“It’s all right, Grandma,” Elif hushed her. She put her palm on the old woman’s shoulder and kissed her head through the black kerchief. “Let’s watch the dancing. Aren’t they pretty?” Baba Mina mumbled something — maybe the crowd had spooked her — and the bagpipe shrieked so near now that all other sound disappeared.
The first man carried his icon across the embers, his feet taking quick steps, kicking up sparks and raising white smoke. One of the women followed. The drums beat faster and the second girl jumped in the embers and carried safely across them the image of the Holy Virgin. It was a beautiful moment: the girls so pretty, the men so strong and courageous. And yet I couldn’t feel this beauty. The whistles had renewed their blowing. The crowd clapped and cheered the way a crowd cheers at a football game. A bitter taste filled my mouth. It was not an ancient mystery we were witnessing, but a show for the tourists — as strange and exotic as they wanted to see it.
“This isn’t right,” I told Elif. My head had started to spin from the weed and the wine and the people, and I felt my stomach rising. “You watch them, I’ll be back in a minute.”
The beach was littered with bottles and cigarette butts and making-out couples. Boys and girls ran half naked along the shoreline and jumped in the sea, screaming. But in the darkness, the air was cooler and so fresh my head cleared quickly. How sad it was to be standing not ten feet from the sea and not see it. How awful to be looking at embers and fire dancers and not feel them. Anger choked me — not just at the drunken tourists, but at the pipers, the drummers, the nestinari. And I would have felt low and angry a long time if at that moment a car hadn’t roared in the distance.
People yelled, others were laughing, and I watched the car, a jeep really, fly through the beach toward the dancing. Not sure why, I started running. I tripped and rolled in the sand, sprinted faster. A dull sickness lodged itself in my stomach. The jeep, like the one Orhan had driven, had stopped not twenty feet from the dancing and the crowd had broken up the circle, blinded by headlights.
I can’t say I was surprised to see the imam climb out. All night, I’d been seeing him in more than a few faces. But to see my grandfather come out of the jeep surprised me. He stood by the front bumper and for a while fought the wind to light a cigarette. The bagpipes were still shrieking, the drummers still beating, and the nestinari kept dancing, but no one watched them. All eyes were on the imam, while his eyes were searching. He hadn’t said one word even and his wife was already walking in his direction. Her head down, she climbed in the back of the jeep, inside the old, wretched cocoon. She untied her headscarf and spread it over her face to hide it.