FIVE
FOR A WEEK after the stroke Grandpa did not find the strength to leave his bed. He refused to eat, drink, or speak, and the only signs of life he showed were when he peeked out the window at the injured stork. I fed them both the same — bread soaked in boiled milk. I’d hold Saint Kosta under my armpit and force the pieces down his bill. He shook his head, tried to flap his wings, clawed the yard’s stones. I’d press the spoon against Grandpa’s lips and we would count the bites. “You’re worse than the saint,” I’d say. “He ate fifteen spoonfuls and you can’t manage even ten.”
Gradually Saint Kosta grew accustomed to the yard. With increasing authority, he paced between the lines of laundry — I washed the sheets often, sometimes twice a day — between the sticks of beans and tomatoes, pecked and clawed at the ground, dug up worms and beetles. In no time he’d learned how to unlatch the door to the basement with his bill and in no time he was hunting mice. “I guess he doesn’t like my milk and bread,” I’d tell Grandpa, and force another spoonful down his throat.
“Frogs,” Grandpa said on the sixth day — the first intelligible word in quite some time. So I sharpened a stick and marched down to the river and didn’t come back until I’d speared half a dozen frogs. “Show me,” Grandpa said, and for the first time I helped him out of bed. He latched on to me with such fear, his body trembling like a walnut leaf, and so I said, “Don’t be afraid. I’m here to hold you.” He dragged his foot across the room and often we stopped and rested.
Out on the terrace, I wrapped him in a blanket and sat him down to watch. It was a proper massacre, the way Saint Kosta speared frog after frog with his bill, the way their guts splashed through the air each time he tossed them up and gulped them down. A fearsome spark ignited in Grandpa’s eyes. “Food,” he roared, and when I brought the bowl of milk and bread, he seized the spoon all on his own. He ate with ferocity that day, and after this he took his meals concurrent with the stork’s.
At first Saint Kosta slept by the well. But one morning, after a night of heavy rains, I found him nestled up on the terrace, atop the blanket that covered Grandpa’s chair. From then on, he climbed the stairs to the terrace often and so it came as no surprise that he should learn to open the door to the kitchen. I first discovered him inside, pecking through a basket of eggs, a line of yolk dripping from his bill and broken bags of flour on the floor around him. When he flapped a wing, the flour rose in a cloud into my face and onto the ceiling.
But it wasn’t until he first snuck into Grandpa’s room that I found myself somewhat weary. “A bit spooky this, a stork roaming the house like a specter.” I had been bringing Grandpa a cup of mursal tea when I discovered them — Saint Kosta, perfectly still in the middle of the room, and Grandpa, equally petrified in bed — each eyeing the other, the way a predator eyes his prey.
“I have this gut feeling,” Grandpa said later with some difficulty, “this stork is not at all a baby. I’ve seen this stork before. He’s come to hold me to account.”
“For what?” I asked him, amused and terrified in equal measure.
And so, it was on an evening some two weeks after the stroke that Grandpa began to tell me about his forceful relocation to Klisura. Saint Kosta had climbed the stairs to the terrace and once in a while, atop the blanket I’d left for him in the corner, he threw his head back and clattered his bill.
What a monster this Communist Party was, I thought, and listened. An omnipotent hydra with many heads and all of them breathing fire. One day you’re teaching at a nice school, in a nice town. You have your own apartment, friends, loved ones, you’re making plans for the future. And then, like that, all that you’ve built, the hydra drowns it in fire. Job, apartment, friends, and loved ones. There you are, at the edge of the world, an exile. Defeated and alone. How does a man rebuild himself, I wondered, after the hydra burns him? How does he learn to live again?
“‘Pack your bags and say your farewells,’ the principal told me that morning. ‘They’re moving you to another school in another district.’”
SIX
“THE MAYOR OF KLISURA was eighty years old. Not a man, but a wild beast. Two meters tall, and a hundred and fifty kilos heavy.”
He’d been born when the village was still part of the Ottoman Empire, and all his life, while great waves of people had sloshed about him, fleeing, arriving, fleeing again, he’d stayed put in Klisura. Out of spite, he told Grandpa, like a worm in a bull’s heart. His skin was a living atlas of all the insurrections. He’d fought in the days of the Strandjan Republic, the Balkan Wars, the two World Wars, the two Communist uprisings. He didn’t speak. He bellowed. This scar I got from a Turk. This from a Serb. This one is Romanian and this one is Greek. And in ’44, I got this scar — the worst — from my father. Sonny, he told me, you speak of Communists and dugouts one more time and I’ll lash you with the poker. He was a hundred years old back then. May God pacify his wicked bones. And every time the mayor laughed, it was like fists were punching Grandpa in the stomach.
“You have no school,” Grandpa told him on their first meeting.
“So you saw it already?” One punch. “That’s the spirit.” And another.
What Grandpa had seen was a pile of ashes. And that’s what he told the mayor. They’d have to rebuild it.
“I like your fire. But I have no money for school-building.”
“Not to worry,” the Pope said later that day, and pulled out a piece of oily paper from his cassock, a pencil from underneath his kalimavka. He called over one of the boys who trotted behind — in those days there was always a crowd of children on their heels — and used his back to write on. “We’ll write to the metropolitan. He’ll give us the money.”
“The metropolitan will give you nothing,” someone wrote back.
“I thought they might say that,” the Pope said.
“But who needs money?” the mayor bellowed. “Plenty of oaks in the forest. That’s how we first built our school, when Captain Kosta made us.”
Grandpa was laughing for the first time in many days. He had regained the color in his cheeks, was strong enough to hold the spoon in his right hand, and walked better now, despite still dragging his foot. Often while he spoke, his eyes drifted over the rooftops, toward the ugly tower and the pile of rubble from the ruined houses. A strange calm had followed the storm — the drivers had not returned yet and we could see now two bright lights glimmering where the bulldozers waited awash in the sinking sun.
So in the beginning there was no school. “Let that be your last worry,” the mayor told Grandpa. “Here are twenty chairs from the municipal building. We’ll set them up in the cherry orchard.” So when the children got hungry all they’d need to do was reach up and pluck some cherries. He wasn’t a great pedagogue, the mayor, but he meant well. “So what should my first worry be?” Grandpa asked him, and he bellowed, “You’ve got no students!”
They opened up the census books and compiled a list of all the families with children ages seven to twelve. “Even those in the upper hamlets?” the mayor asked. “And the Mohammedans too?”
“Now this is what I call a list,” the Pope said when Grandpa showed him. “I think I’ll join you.”