For days the two of them walked from one house to another. “They look at us like we are saints,” the Pope said once. And he was right. The women kissed their hands. The men offered to roll them tobacco — they had nothing of greater value to give. The little daughters, blushing, held forth dried plums and apple rinds in their aprons. “Such poverty,” the Pope would say, and cross himself and bless them all.
And once they climbed outside the village up the hills — such filth, such misery and stench. Sheep, goats, chickens, babies nursing; the old ones and the young, all packed together in the same windowless huts. Thin, sickly people. Even the fires in their hearths looked thin and sickly, barely enough oxygen in the stuffy rooms to keep them burning.
My boys died yesteryear, teacher. The plague took them. We lost three girls. My son. My little daughter. Typhus. Measles. Malaria. Grippe. And all across the hills — in meadows amid the thick oak forests — little hamlets with their huts burned down in long-gone wars. Wreckage and rubble. Old trenches now filling up with earth, like jaws closing slowly, and the bones of the dead still showing white among the wild vines, the thorns, and the nettles.
The list said fifty children in the upper hamlets. Of those fifty, eleven were still living.
“Don’t go farther up the slope, teacher,” a mother told them outside her lonely hut. She’d lost her five children and her husband. “The plague is still alive up there.” The Pope held a crucifix to her chapped lips. “Where were you yesteryear, Father?” she said, but not with any accusation. “I buried them alone under the oak tree.”
“I’ll go to sanctify their bones,” the Pope told her, and she shrugged.
“Sanctify me. I dug the graves.”
They left her sitting outside the hut, petting in her lap a rug of goat hair, her eyes locked onto a great, invisible-for-them abyss. Once they’d lost her from sight, the Pope broke down in tears. “Who’ll dig her grave?” he said. And then, “I’m going to the upper houses.”
So up they went. One hut to another. Beautiful children there. Rosy cheeks and black eyes, burning. Typhus. Made the dying look so handsome. And awfully thirsty. There was a well some five hundred meters from one hut — or rather, a hole in the ground — but it had been a while since last the family had had the strength to draw water. So Grandpa filled a bucket and the Pope brought the gourd from mouth to mouth — four children, their parents, and an old grandma, all of them quaffing like wild beasts.
“You’re a Christian priest,” the father whispered.
“And you’re dying,” the Pope told him. “Gather your family. Step outside into the sunlight.”
He baptized them into Christ, pouring water on their heads from the gourd. On parting, he gifted them a small icon of the Holy Virgin. The old woman was the first to kiss it.
“I was a little tiny girl,” she said, “the first time they baptized me. Allah have mercy. And the Virgin.”
SEVEN
SO WHAT if the children of Klisura were romping wild things? So what if he taught classes in the cherry orchard and had to bring the barber to shear not just their heads, but also his because of head lice? So what if the fleas chewed him to the bone and anything he ate in those early weeks gave him diarrhea? The Party had meant to break him, so to hell with the Party. That’s what Grandpa told himself each night in the mayor’s house, where he was lodging. If the mayor could sleep on a rug on the floor, so could Grandpa. If bread and water were good enough for the mayor, then they were good enough for my grandfather. Where did the Party think Grandpa had slept when he was little? What did they think his meals had comprised in those days when two of his brothers were wasted in the famine? And his own grandfather in the Balkan War. Punish him! To teach children, who, wild as they were, kissed his hand? Who, when he told them stories of khans and tsars and rebels, watched him as though it were a mountain of sweets they were watching? Who memorized fairy tales and poems as easily as the lark learns singsong? He enjoyed himself, my grandfather. He was even grateful. That is, until the Greeks came to the village and walked in the fire.
* * *
It was raining that night. June 2. The mayor always went to bed right after sunset, but that night he lit a lantern and took it out on the terrace. Grandpa didn’t ask him why, only sat beside him, and they smoked, saying nothing. Rain fell in buckets, but every time it lightened the mayor sent a whistle into the darkness. He’d get up from his chair and pace about and curse the downpour. “You’ll catch a cold out here,” he’d say. But Grandpa refused to leave him. Instead, he rolled new cigarettes and they sat silent. They must have gone through an entire pouch of tobacco that night.
Then, just after midnight, the dark sent back a whistle — somewhere across the hill yonder. The rain picked up. A proper storm was raging, but out on the terrace the two men remained, waiting. Grandpa was first to hear it — the noise of feet splashing in the mud — and when a bolt of lightning flashed he saw them: pitch-black figures, in a thin file. The mayor sprinted to the gates and held them open and one by one the figures trickled into the courtyard. Grandpa lit more lamps inside the house while outside by the well the newcomers washed their feet with pails of water. Grandpa’s head was spinning, not just from the tobacco but from the stench these people brought in. One by one the hoods were lowered and the room grew brighter, each wet face reflecting the light of the oil lamps. One by one they sat on the floor, muddy despite the washing. Men and women and children — twelve of them, Grandpa counted. But the thirteenth wasn’t sitting yet. The mayor pulled out a dagger from his sash and slashed the rope with which the thirteenth man had fixed to his back a bundle. Inside the bundle, Grandpa found out later, were three sacred icons. But those he didn’t see until the following day.
No one spoke and quickly the heads were drooping, the eyes were flittering, closing. Every now and then a boy let out a cough in the corner. Wrapped in a thick cloak, with only his face showing, thin and ashen, he sat away from the others and shivered. “Go to your room,” the mayor told Grandpa, but Grandpa couldn’t leave them. To see these men, the way their eyes burned, the knives in their sashes, the cudgels they propped like rifles against the wall, it set his blood on fire.
They all slept on the floor that night, together. All throughout, the sick boy coughed in the corner and his teeth chattered. Grandpa took pity on him and brewed him some mint tisane, but the boy only sank deeper into his cloak, not looking up for even a moment. Maybe it was this cloak that confused Grandpa, for the next day, without it, he realized the boy was no boy really. Her name was Lenio and she was blazing with awful fear. Tomorrow, for the first time in her life, she was to face the fire. But no one knew yet if Saint Constantine would lead her through it or if he’d let her get burned.
EIGHT
JUNE 3, GRANDPA HAD GATHERED, was the feast day of Klisura, a celebration of its patron saints, Constantine and Elena. And seeing how the parents of his students were growing ever curious to learn the kind of tricks he taught their children, he decided to stage a little performance. The cherry orchard overflowed with guests that morning. His students recited all thirty letters of the alphabet and counted to one hundred, named the seven days of the week, the twelve months of the year. A song was sung, two poems chanted. So wild were the applause and whistles at the end that ripe cherries fell to the ground and sweet fragrance chased away the smell of garlic, onions, and sweat.