Right away they came to a fence in the forest. The same one I’d snuck across with Elif. Like me, Grandpa found himself passing a hamlet of Turkish houses. Like me he thought, can it be this easy?
But this border was only a fake one. You were expected to cross it and think that you’d made it. You look around: huts, a hamlet. I’m in Turkey! And just when you calm down, the guards get you.
At last they came to the real border. The moon was thin; the night was pitch-dark. And in the darkness, the tip of a cigarette glowed red. From the bushes the mayor hooted like an owl. The red ember drew an arc and shattered on the ground into a shower of smaller embers.
“You’re late,” the soldier whispered when they stepped out of the bushes to meet him. For the rest of the way, he was quiet. He was a local boy. What else was there to say? He let them cross. It was that easy.
Once they cleared the border, the mayor whistled again into the darkness. By then, Grandpa had learned a bit about this birdsong language. He tried to explain it now — how it was a mix of Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish; how each syllable was rendered by a different tone — but I’d be lying if I said I understood him. I trusted him, however, and that was sufficient.
Somewhere in the distance a bird answered. Someone had heard and now would pass along the message. We’re coming. They walked all through the night, along the bank of a river — the same river that if followed downstream led to Klisura and to the old walnut. They slept at dawn, hidden in the thick of the forest. At sunset they arrived in the village.
To look at it, you’d think you were in Klisura. Even the house Captain Vangelis met them in was like the mayor’s. In just a year’s time, the captain’s hair had turned bone-white. His sons too had grown older. And Lenio—
That evening under the trellised vine, Grandpa couldn’t eat a bite. That night, in the barn where the men had bedded down, he couldn’t sleep a minute. His heart was in his throat, beating.
She was a woman now. Sixteen. And promised in marriage to Michalis — the younger son of Captain Elias, that beardless boy Grandpa had seen a full year before. And he was still beardless, his face as smooth as river rock; but handsome, chiseled. They would marry them off in one more year.
That night Grandpa burned with fever. He felt better in the morning, but by the next evening he was again burning. My heart is breaking, he thought. He could barely stand on his feet while the nestinari were dancing. But it was only after he made it back to Klisura a week later, neither dead nor alive, his insides splitting, only after the Pope brought a doctor from town, that they realized the real reason. “Malaria,” Grandpa said, and was quiet.
Uncomfortable, I turned under the trellis. Now that proper summer was upon us, the mosquitoes had come back. And since the sun was setting—
“Let’s go inside,” I said, but Grandpa wouldn’t.
He told me to man up. And then to let him have at least one smoke.
“You’re doing fine without,” I said. But I could see what was eating him — Lenio, risen from the river of his mind.
“The day before we left for Klisura,” he said, and lit up, “we ate a farewell lunch in Captain Vangelis’s courtyard.”
His fever was so bad people said his teeth chattered like a stork’s bill. They too had storks there, in Kostitsa. Teacher Stork, the kids cried behind his back, laughing. So he mustered his last strength and dragged himself to the table. He acted well, lest Lenio think he was a weakling. He plopped himself down in a chair and this awful chord echoed, like a cat dying, and then wood splitting. Next thing he knew, Lenio was sobbing by his side, a half-crushed mandolin in her hands. “Beyond repair,” Captain Vangelis said, and waved carelessly. “Here, have a raki. Don’t sweat it.”
For the rest of their stay Lenio hid in her room, sobbing. She hated his guts, Grandpa was certain. The illness would kill him and never again would he see her.
“But you were mistaken,” I said while he finished his cigarette in silence. Saint Kosta had come to his side and he petted his long neck and good wing gently. “Let’s go inside,” he said, and when he made for the terrace the stork followed. But I stayed behind for a while, despite the mosquitoes.
Some time ago, while I rummaged through the classroom that was the first floor of our house, I’d found a mandolin wrapped in a white sheet. Half the strings hung broken; the others needed tuning.
“Where did you find this?” Grandpa said when I showed him. And when I asked if he could play it, he only waved, angered. He didn’t touch the mandolin then, but a few days later I found him smoking on the terrace, staring intently at the bundled sheet across the table.
“My boy,” he’d told me, and for some time chewed on his lower lip. “This thing. Get it away, will you?”
FIFTEEN
IT TOOK GRANDPA MONTHS TO RECOVER from the malaria. In fact, I remember him terribly feverish on two occasions when I was still a child. He had burned for weeks, but I don’t remember ever thinking twice about it. Only now, years later, did I realize that what I’d considered, in my childish ignorance, to be bouts of heavy flu had really been malarial relapses — the dormant parasite in Grandpa’s liver infecting his blood again.
And who should care for him in those days of sickness if not the one girl who, even in good health, visited him daily? Grandpa didn’t want her by his side, but there she was: soaking a towel in vinegar and spreading it over his forehead to extinguish the fire, bringing him thick skim from the milk, white and yellow cheese, and when he was stronger, rooster soup, grape leaf sarmi.
At first people were talking, then they had talked it all out. It was no longer newsworthy gossip — Mina the shepherd’s daughter, taking a tin of banitsa to the teacher. “So when’s the wedding?” the mayor said, laughing, once, and after that, on more than one occasion, he made sure to tell Grandpa that unless he intended to marry the poor girl, he should not see her alone in his room, behind the closed door.
In October Grandpa traveled all the way to Burgas and from a store on the main street bought a brand-new Cremona mandolin. At first he kept it wrapped in its thick brown paper, but one night, smoking on the terrace, with the dark so dark, and the hills so tall and many between here and Kostitsa, he took it out and strummed it. Even the dreary noise he made was better than the silence. Night after night, he stroked the strings, each tone a syllable he sent into the night, across the border and the hills. He talked to Lenio this way.
“An instrument for females,” the mayor often told him. But he began to visit Grandpa’s terrace often. Eyes closed, he smoked, drank rakia, while Grandpa played. It was from the mayor that Grandpa first heard stories of Captain Kosta, of the Strandjan Republic.
The rebellion had risen on the day of Christ’s Transfiguration in 1903, and quickly, with little blood, the Turks had been driven out of the mountain. A night of great celebration followed — songs, wine, sheep on the spit. Only Captain Kosta sat by the fire, ate nothing, drank nothing, but watched the twisting flame.
So the mayor, then only twenty years old, brought his captain some mutton, a meh of red wine. The captain took the meat and ate, then drank some wine from the skin. “Thank you, Petre,” he said, for Petar was the mayor’s name. “I forgot to eat. And drinking slipped my mind.” Then he called the boy over. “Sit down and talk to me a little. I’m frightened.”
Captain Kosta, the fierce voivode — he who had fought the Serbs at Slivnitsa and won; he who had just that morning stormed the Turkish konak at the head of his rebels and driven from there Ali Bey like a mangy dog — frightened? The mayor was smacked speechless. “What scares you, Captain?” he managed to stutter, and he felt like not just his own life but the faith of the entire world depended on this single answer.