“Freedom,” Captain Kosta said. “She puts me in a fright, Petre. For in this very moment we are free the way few men before us have been. The sultan doesn’t rule us. The Bulgarian tsar doesn’t rule us. The tsar of Russia doesn’t rule us. We are our own. We are the Strandja Mountains. And man, Petre, was not made to be a mountain.”
“Man’s bones are brittle,” the mayor would bellow on Grandpa’s terrace, usually sipping his third glass of rakia. “But metal too is brittle. So, to harden it, you dip it in fire and in water, you pound it with the hammer. That’s how you make daggers. All my life the hammer beats me. Turks and Serbs and Greeks and Communists. Different names, the same hammer. It pounds my bones and turns them to daggers. All my life these daggers cut me. Just when one wound heals, they open up another.”
But by the fifth glass, the mayor would grow quiet and listen to Grandpa stroke the Cremona. “Promise,” he’d say, “when you lay me down in the earth, to play me a sweet song. Don’t let that devil the priest come near.”
I’ve often thought about the mayor’s words since then — about the bones and the daggers. Whether these words were really the mayor’s or only Grandpa’s I couldn’t be certain. But I find the idea that every hardship in our lives is a hammerfall meant to harden our frame strangely unsettling. It seems to me that two opposing forces battle for control of our will. The body strives for ease and comfort. Don’t wound me, it shouts, and if a dagger cuts, it fights to heal the wound, for wounded the body expires. The spirit, on the other hand, wants to be wounded. Cut me, it shouts, and fights to keep each wound bleeding, for in ease and comfort the spirit withers. Therein, I’ve come to think, lies the quandary of the man who holds the dagger — to cut himself or not.
SIXTEEN
“LISTEN, TEACHER,” the mayor told Grandpa that spring. “Why beat about the bush? I’m getting old and feeble. You’re young and strapping. I like you. People respect you. I want you to be the new vekilin, the caretaker of the nestinari.”
It goes without saying, Grandpa accepted. Hadn’t he seen how the fire dancers treated the mayor? How Lenio kissed his hand? The very thought of her lips on his knuckles was enough to keep him sleepless. He’d take care of all the fire dancers in this world if that meant Lenio would be near.
So that spring, Grandpa helped the mayor patch up the shrine under the walnut, clean up the holy springs in the forest, repair their roofs and fences. When the Greeks arrived that June, Grandpa again was there to meet them. The two captains embraced him. Their sons shook his hand warmly. And when Lenio stood before him — more beautiful now than he’d ever seen her — Grandpa’s heart knocked so loudly he thought the whole village would hear it. Blushing, she made to kiss his right hand, but Captain Vangelis stopped her. “He’s not yet the vekilin,” he said, laughing, and sent her to kiss the hand of the mayor.
From then on, through every ritual Grandpa shadowed the old man. He was allowed to set the icons on the shelf in the shrine, and it was Grandpa who slaughtered the sacrificial ram in the church courtyard. “Shame on you, comrade teacher,” Father Dionysus said, smiling slyly. “Taking up witchcraft because of some Greek damsel. And here is Mina, the shepherd’s daughter, a perfectly fine Bulgarian girl.”
Somehow he knew all this, the Pope. He’d kept a close watch, his eye trained for just such details. And it seemed Mina herself had come to suspect that Grandpa was in love with the Greek girl — for during the second night of dancing, the one in honor of Saint Elena, Mina threw herself onto the embers barefooted. She burned her soles, was taken home for treatment, but never cried in pain. To impress the teacher, people began to whisper. Mad, mad with love she is, they said. May Saint Kosta forgive her for getting his fire dirty.
On parting, Grandpa mustered the courage to give Lenio the mandolin he’d bought her. It was an opportune moment, and one of repetition — she was washing her feet in the courtyard while inside the mayor’s house the others readied for their journey.
She took the mandolin and blushed. Then, never raising her eyes to look at Grandpa, she seized his hand and kissed his knuckles. She ran upstairs, her bare feet flapping and leaving prints in the yard, a flock of black birds. Before the flock had scattered completely in the heat, Lenio’s father, Captain Vangelis, emerged from the house, the wrapped mandolin in his choke hold.
“Thank you, teacher,” he told Grandpa. “But she has Michalis now to give her presents.”
“Teacher, teacher,” old Baba Vida told Grandpa that evening, after the Greeks had gone up the mountain. “Do you see now what I once saw?”
“I see nothing,” Grandpa told her, for really, there was plenty he still could not envision.
SEVENTEEN
THE STORKS DREW CARTWHEELS in the skies. Harvest and vintage came and passed. The fields readied themselves for sleep and for the first time in many months they loosened their grip on the people. Children returned to school; the young ones began to plan their weddings. And in Kostitsa, across the border, Lenio too would soon be getting married. Out on the terrace, playing the mandolin, Grandpa counted the days till her wedding to Michalis.
That October, a winter chill gripped the Strandja. Ice encased the ancient oaks and from the cherry orchard there came the roar of cannons — the trees were bursting with the cold, their leaves still on the branches. At first the snow was thick and sticky, but soon the gale hardened it and even the children would not go out and play.
Two weeks before Lenio’s wedding, Vassilko, the village idiot, brought Grandpa a letter. The letter had been smuggled across the border, he said, and when he told Grandpa that Lenio had written it, Grandpa raised his hand to strike the boy. But when they broke the envelope open a lock of black hair tied with a red thread fell out. The letter was in Greek, which Grandpa didn’t read; and since he was afraid to take it to the mayor, in his confusion my grandfather did the only thing left to do.
“She doesn’t want to marry,” Father Dionysus said when he set down the letter. “She wants you to save her.” But he wasn’t smiling and his voice was low, almost a whisper.
For three days Grandpa didn’t sleep a minute. He forgot to eat, drink, shave, bathe even. “Teacher,” his students giggled, “show us your teeth and ears! Pull off your stockings!”
It was one week before the feast of Saint Demetrius, the feast that opened the wedding season, in the old style on November 8, when Grandpa returned to the church, panting.
“You must help me steal her,” he told Father Dionysus.
* * *
Grandpa knew that since her birth Lenio had been promised to Michalis — the two families of fire dancers maintaining their special bond. What he didn’t know yet was that Lenio had never intended to go through with the wedding.
For Lenio was in love with another boy, her age and from her village, a sweet talker who’d told her many lies. He would save her from Michalis; rescue her from her father. He’d made a lot of money driving sheep herds down to the Aegean. And with the money, they’d run to freedom. Istanbul, he told her, smoking a cigarette atop a pile of hay in his father’s hayloft. That’s where he’d take her. They’d live in a house on the Bosphorus — out one window they’d be looking at Asia. Out the other — at Europe.