“There in the bus,” the old man said, his eyes glistening from the exhaust, “you kept staring. Why?”
I said I’d taken him for someone else.
“For whom?”
“My grandfather.”
“Maybe I am.”
That was unlikely; he looked nothing like the man.
He tossed his cigarette and the wind carried it halfway across the square. “Come with me on an errand. Then I’ll take you to his house.”
“Why?”
“Why, why. For the thrill. For the adventure. Isn’t this why you all come here to the mountain? With your cameras and video recorders.”
I realized then that the old man had started walking toward the bridge. And unconsciously I followed. I was jet-lagged, once more hungry; my head was spinning from the trip. I didn’t have the energy to fight him. Besides, which way would I go to my grandfather’s? And so I asked how long the errand would take us and if the chicken was involved.
“This chicken is a lie,” he said. “It’s for a little girl who’s very ill.” Without turning, he asked me if I believed in lies. That lies could cure. I said sure, maybe, I didn’t know. “The girl’s mother does,” he said. “She begged me to bring this chicken. Also, this chicken is a rooster and if you can’t tell that much, well then, you are a city fool.”
I laughed. “You may be right,” I said, and I think he also laughed, but with the wind in our faces I wasn’t sure.
The bridge vibrated at our feet and its metal ropes creaked. Below us the river rushed muddy and wide, high from rain or snow melting upstream. A cobblestone road, which the wind had swept perfectly, took us past a flock of empty houses, the likes of which I’d never seen before. Later I learned such was the Strandjan architecture — the ground floor with walls of neatly fitted stones, where back in the day the cattle slept. The floor above — a deck with walls of wide, oak-wood planks; a covered corridor encircling the rooms, a terrace, and in one corner, the privy.
The old man led and I followed. The ancient houses alternated with modern ones — clean, lime-washed façades, shiny red-tiled roofs — and in the distance above them, thin as a knife and black with the sun behind it, the minaret of a mosque. We saw not a soul until we passed the village café. Which later I found out was also the grocery store. And the barber shop. On tables outside, men drank coffee, or lemonade from tall glass bottles. Some played backgammon, others cards. I’d never seen so many mustaches and prickly beards in one place.
“Salaam alaikum!” someone called. “You come to sell at last?”
The old man halted. Petting the rooster, he eyed the one who’d spoken. That man was also old. He stood in the doorframe and cleaned a glass with a towel.
“And who’s the beardless beauty beside you?”
“His lawyer,” someone else said, and the crowd burst out laughing.
The old man pointed to the sign above the entrance.
“It’s in Turkish,” he told me with a smirk. “It says Suleiman Pasha Café. You know why?”
I shrugged. I suddenly felt very thirsty.
“A hundred and thirty years ago, Suleiman Pasha, on his way to be spanked by the Russian army, stopped here to drink a coffee. And for a hundred and thirty years, these fools won’t shut up about it. Listen, kardash,” he called to the man in the doorframe, “I know where Suleiman Pasha squatted after he drank your hogwash. He didn’t make it far. I’ll show you and you can write a sign.”
A new gust of laughter stirred the bushy mustaches. The man in the doorway waved the towel like a white flag after us — we had started up the road again. “Come back tomorrow,” he called. “I’ve just received some of your favorite tea. We’ll play backgammon. Bring the boy.” The old man raised his hand as if to give a maybe.
“His name is Osman Rejep, but everyone calls him Baklava Osman. I gave him this nickname myself, when he was still a boy. Why? Only God remembers.”
To this, I had absolutely nothing to say. We rounded a corner. We had arrived.
The house was of the modern kind. The mica in its plaster glistened in the sun and gave it a gentle glow. The old man slammed his fist against the yard gates and they rang like a bell. He kept on pounding.
“Why don’t you slam harder?” a woman cried from inside the house. “That ought to make me run faster.” The front door flew open and a barefooted girl flapped across the tiled path in the yard. She was adjusting her headscarf — a blue kerchief with blooming red carnations imprinted in the cloth — but when she recognized the old man she flung the scarf away and shoved it in the back pocket of her jeans. She was younger than me, but not by much, her hair short, like a boy’s. Her face was flushed, and sweat ran down her cheeks in trickles, down her neck.
“Marhaba, Grandpa,” she said as she opened the gates and flashed us her bone-white teeth. Then she saw the rooster and her smile expired.
“So you’ve brought a rooster,” she said, and looked at me. “Two roosters.” There was something cruel in the way she pursed her thin lips, in the way her large black eyes watched me, unblinking. Maybe that’s why I was reminded of the girl from the station.
“Grandpa,” she said, “tell him to pick his jaw up off the ground.”
Oh, please, I wanted to say. But, knowing that my accent thickened in moments of anxiety and anger, I kept quiet. The girl was leading us across the yard when somewhere behind the hilltops the whistle of a songbird rang and then grew quiet. The old man halted and so did the girl. They listened intently, and only after another bird had answered, somewhere from within the village, did they resume. I watched her scarf wave from her back pocket like a fox’s tail. Her jeans rustled with every step up, up the outside staircase to the second floor, and a new kind of uneasiness flooded my head.
The stench of something burned slapped us at the threshold. In a flash, I saw my mother helping me plant candles in a church sandbox, for the dead. Careless, still a child, I’d held the candle much too close. The stench of burned hair had haunted me for weeks. It was this smell I tasted now as the girl led us through the dark hallway.
For the first time I thought of the sick girl we were about to meet. What was her illness and how were we supposed to help her? And gradually, all sense of adventure left me. Listen, old man, I was about to say, but then the rooster crowed. It flapped its wings as if behind the door we stood by was rising the morning sun.
“All night, Grandpa,” the girl said. “All night Aysha jumped and danced about the room. So Father tied her down to the bed, but even then she kept on wailing. When the sun rose, she wailed louder. So we covered the window, like you told us to, and only then did she fall asleep. But I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t study. And I can’t fail another exam.”
Clumsily, the old man petted the girl’s head. “Elif, Elif,” he said. Then Elif pushed the door open and led us in.
The room was pungent with the stink of soot. Dressed in a white gown and tied to the bed with a thin rope lay Aysha, the sick girl. Her face was pale in the gloom and perfectly still, like a frozen puddle, and only her eyes flittered under her closed lids. She looked ten, no older. The rope snaked over a red pillow on her chest, a pillow on her thighs, a pillow on her ankles. The soles of her feet were covered with blisters so deep I couldn’t bear to look.
“Grandpa,” someone called, and from a rug in the corner a third woman rose, older than the others. A green scarf whose edges were dark from sweat framed her flushed, tired face.
“She’s slept all day,” the mother whispered. “But we’re afraid to untie her.” She leaned forward and kissed the old man’s hand. “Help us,” she said. Her eyes shone feverish when she looked up at me, and I understood that this woman too was sick.