“My daddy has a hundred white sheep,” she sometimes told him, which was to say, There isn’t a bachelor in the village who wouldn’t want me as his wife, yet here I am, at your threshold.
“She loved me very much,” Grandpa said now on the terrace. And back in those days, he often wondered, what would it be like to have her as his wife? Her father, the chief shepherd of the collective, the hundred white sheep, the jars of yogurt. She was a pretty girl, no doubt. She spoke sweetly and looked at him in a way that was calming — he would be lucky to have her. And yet he wasn’t feeling lucky. At night, alone in the quiet school, it was the Greek girl Grandpa thought of. He dreamed of her face running black with ashes, imagined the rustle of her bare feet in the coals, felt her touch on his fingers, and sometimes, when a girl was laughing somewhere in the village, he thought it was the Greek girl, Lenio, he was hearing.
Each day at the threshold he scooped thick yogurt from the jar, guiltily, knowing full well he’d soon have to come to a decision. Take the girl and the hundred white sheep, or push away the jar before her heart shattered.
“I led her on, my boy. Day after day.”
And in the end, is there a force darker than a woman with a broken heart?
“Poor Baba Mina,” I said, and tried to see her, not as I remembered her, unraveling old sweaters by the fire, babbling of her father’s sheep, but as Grandpa had seen her in those days, bringing him yogurt, a young and pretty girl, in love.
FOURTEEN
GRANDPA’S FIRST SUMMER in Klisura was coming to an end. The storks rose in giant flocks, the leaves of the cherries dropped yellow, and the sweet smell of rot filled the air. Soon the days grew short and chilly. First snows fell, melted, then came to stay. Every morning, at the school’s threshold, Grandpa collected the wood his students brought — one log per child, for the stove in the classroom. Every morning, Grandpa inspected their teeth, to see if they’d brushed them; their ears, to see if they’d washed them. Once a week, he made them pull off a stocking. To save time, he checked the right foot only. If the toenails weren’t clipped, he wrote a note to reprimand the parents. Teacher, teacher! the children cried one day. He had just inspected Mehmed’s right foot — the nails in a somewhat satisfactory condition. Check his other foot. The left one! Not nails, talons! His mother, the boy admitted, sobbing, was much too busy now that his father had gone away. She had not the time for clipping nails, and clipped only the ones she knew the teacher was inspecting.
“He was a good boy — Mehmed,” Grandpa told me. We were taking our daily walk up the road, to the wreckage of the houses. Ahead of us, Saint Kosta was pulling something from a pile of fallen branches. “His voice was honey. I’d say, Now children, let’s sing a song. But the moment Mehmed opened his mouth, they all shut theirs. They were ashamed to sing while he was singing.” The snow falling in the courtyard, the stove bursting with flame, and Mehmed, singing sweetly. And now Grandpa stopped in the middle of the road and turned his head to listen, eyes closed, as if he could hear Mehmed’s singsong.
“His father had been the village imam. A year before I came to Klisura, the militia had taken him away. Most likely to a labor camp. They never heard from him again.”
It was only appropriate that at this moment, Mehmed, now grown-up, himself the imam of Klisura, himself a father, should start singing from the minaret. And yet it wasn’t time for prayer. Instead, we heard the wind speeding through the dead road and in the wind Saint Kosta, gulping down a mouse he’d just killed.
* * *
The snows melted and the cherries bloomed. The storks returned. A year had gone by since Grandpa had first set foot in Klisura. And soon the feast of Saint Constantine was once more near.
“Come with me across the border,” the mayor, caretaker of the nestinari, said to Grandpa. And he told him the story I knew from Elif — of how once upon a time the nestinari lived protected by the Turkish sultan. But how one day without reason, the Turks slaughtered as many fire dancers as they could and torched their village. The few survivors roamed the Strandja in search of a new home, half of them stopping in Klisura, the other half across the hills, in what was now Turkey. To keep the memory alive, each group vowed to safeguard the icons of the other and to meet year after year, once in Klisura, once there, across the hills — in Kostitsa.
“Kostitsa,” I said. “The word for little bone?” But Grandpa shook his head. It was Saint Constantine’s name that had shaped that of the village.
We were sitting out in the yard now, under the trellis, tossing back and forth a rag ball I’d made from an old shirtsleeve. We were working on Grandpa’s dexterity, on his reflexes after the stroke. At first, catching the ball had been a serious challenge. But he was doing better. The day was warm. The air smelled of ripening tomatoes. As always, Saint Kosta strolled through the yard, searching for mice or moles to prey on.
“I can’t cross the border,” Grandpa told the mayor. After all, he was serving a punishment for his Party resignation. They’d never give him the necessary papers. But the mayor swatted his paw. Papers were for book rats.
And so, one evening with the sunset, four days before the feast of Saints Constantine and Elena, the mayor, Grandpa, Vassilko, two local men, and three women made for the Turkish border. Teary Baba Vida waved after them from the shrine’s threshold; she was too old to make the journey.
“Tell me, Grandma,” Grandpa asked her, “what did you mean the night of the dances?” Don’t do it, she had warned him. But now she shrugged her bony shoulders. “If only I remembered, sinko, the things I saw each time Saint Kosta took me.”
Father Dionysus caught up with them at the end of the village. The sacred icons were safeguarded in his church and wasn’t he responsible for every candle, candelabra, lamp, and wooden box? What would the metropolitan say if he knew the Pope was allowing—
“Fine, come along then!” cried the mayor. “Just give that tongue of yours some rest.”
He was a sly devil, Father Dionysus. It took Grandpa much too long to figure that out. Yes, the Party had sent him to christen the Muslims. But there were other tasks he’d been given. In the end it turned out Father Dionysus worked for the CSS. The Committee for State Security. Among other things, the Pope kept an eye on my grandfather; each month he wrote reports on all that Grandpa was doing.
“A secret agent priest!” I laughed, as if that were funny. I tossed the ball and Grandpa caught it firmly in his fist.
Sneaking across the border is and always has been a suicidal endeavor. You will be shot on sight. But back in those Cold War days, security was even tighter. Because of its proximity to Turkey, Klisura itself was then in a border zone. You couldn’t just come to the village the way you did today. Back then, you needed special permission. That, Grandpa had. But crossing the border was another story.