Sweetly, sweetly the boy spun his yarns in the hayloft. He told her not to be afraid. It’s just a little peck on the lips, he told her. All the other girls have done it. Relax now. We’ll run away, I promise.
Three weeks before the wedding, Lenio snuck out of her house and hid at the end of the village, by the fountain with the seven spouts. That’s where they’d conspired to meet. All day she waited. It was raining. At last, at dusk, she saw her brothers racing through the deluge. Christ, Lenio, they cried. We were so worried. We turned the village upside down looking for you.
That day, her sweetheart vanished without a trace. Never again did she see him.
She knew well what would happen the night after the wedding. What her father, the Wild Ram, what the whole village would do to her when the bedsheet was carried out into the courtyard, for everyone to see it, clean as a snowdrop. So she made plans to run away. She hadn’t even reached the fountain when her brothers were hot on her heels already. Frightened is the poor dove, the old women giggled. Nothing was new under the sun.
They locked her up in the house and it was then that she wrote the letter. Who else was there to help but the new vekilin, the caretaker, the kind teacher, her last and only true hope?
“Saint Kosta bless you!” Captain Vangelis bellowed when he saw at his threshold Grandpa, and by his side Father Dionysus, their beards frozen solid. “You’ve shown me a great honor, teacher, coming to the wedding!”
For three days and nights the guests feasted, readying themselves for the proper wedding feast. No expense was spared. After all, Captain Vangelis had but a single daughter, dearer to him than the pupils of his eyes. Wine and rakia. Only they could drown his sorrow — to see her taken away by another man. Yet it was a sweet sorrow. The man was worthy. Michalis. Of a worthy kin.
On the night before the wedding, Grandpa stepped over the drunk guests scattered across the floor and forced open the door to Lenio’s cell. She had dressed as thickly as she could, and he gave her the hooded cloak he’d stolen from a guest. How no one saw them sneak out of the house, Grandpa couldn’t tell me. Maybe everyone there was too drunk to notice. Maybe they all thought it was a man under the cloak, not the bride, running. After all, Grandpa himself had once made that error. Maybe it was for both these reasons.
“God have mercy,” Father Dionysus mumbled outside, and blessed them, and then himself, with the sign of the cross. A vicious gale was raging — sleet lashing like a whip — and growing more fierce by the minute. “Look on the bright side,” Grandpa shouted over the howling. “They’ll never catch us in this storm.”
“God have mercy,” the Pope repeated. And up they went, into the mountain.
EIGHTEEN
AND SO WE DRANK, Grandpa and I. And so we got drunk on ghosts and days long gone. The more he told me of the nestinari, the more his head turned. The more he remembered Lenio, the hungrier the fire that engulfed his brain boomed. As for me, did I not own a head that turns? To think of nothing but Elif and hear nothing but Grandpa’s story, daytime in waking and at night in my sleep? Lenio and Elif. Myself and Grandpa. With every word the borders crumbled; the territories of our hearts expanded, overlapped, and merged into one. Grandpa’s longing was my own. My own sadness had become his. And that vanished youthful courage of his now flowed alive in my bloodstream, reckless, savage, impossible to weather.
I hadn’t cut my hair since first setting foot in Klisura. In three weeks we hadn’t shaved. Besides the sweat, we stank of onions and cheese. In short, we looked the part: the old captain with the stroke-eaten brain. The boy smacked stupid with love. The saint stork with the broken wing. A company of rebels.
“Grandpa,” I cried one evening on the terrace. “We can’t admit defeat like this.” Elif had been taken away. The imam had begun to demolish our houses. What else was left for us to lose?
He knew exactly what I would ask him. And I in turn knew he would not deny me. But all the same, I sang it loudly, as if a rebel song.
“You have to help me steal Elif.”
PART FIVE
ONE
IN MY DREAMS, I am two meters tall. My shirt is white like bones, and two bloodred kerchiefs flap on my chest like wings. Bolts of silver lightning embroider my britches; clumps of brass bells adorn my boots. Two daggers nestle in my sash and in my hand I grip a cudgel. A damask rose rests behind my ear. A sprig of wild geranium sits between my teeth. I smell of rose oil and like a man, of sweat. At my feet, the earth is singing. Wherever I pass, the air comes to a boil.
In my dreams, I need no ladders. A single leap is all it takes to climb the wall. A single push to throw the window open. “Good evening,” I tell Elif, my breath pine needles. “I’ve come to steal you.” Her face turns yogurt-pale. She wants to be taken, I can tell, but not like this, without a fight. She splinters a chair against my skull. She kicks me in the shin. And when I lay my palm to silence any screaming, she sinks her teeth down to the bone.
It’s then she swoons. It’s then I throw her on my shoulder and carry her off into the night. There are no complications in my dreams. No repercussions.
But this is not my dreams.
All day a warm wind blew from Turkey. All day the window frames of the abandoned houses rattled, the hedges howled, and empty tin cans rolled through our yard. Even at dusk, the wind persisted. Saint Kosta had tired of chasing the cans. Perched in his corner on the terrace, he watched us cast die after die and wait for sunset. When a half-moon rose above the Strandjan hills, we filled two small glasses with rakia and downed them, bottoms up.
The plan — if you could call it that — was very simple: Grandpa would ask to see the imam and while the two talked business in the living room, I’d climb through Elif’s window. This was as far ahead as we had thought it out.
We locked Saint Kosta in the yard and made for the Muslim hamlet. We carried our own ladder — Grandpa in the lead, and I ten feet behind. But by the time we were crossing the bridge Saint Kosta had already caught up with us. Most likely he’d jumped the fence, which only strengthened my suspicion — his wing wasn’t really broken. He was pretending; whatever the reason, he refused to fly.
As planned, we chucked the ladder over the imam’s fence. As planned, Grandpa let himself in through the yard gate and knocked on the front door of the house. We didn’t plan for Elif’s mother to answer and tell Grandpa that, quite predictably, the imam had gone to the mosque for the evening prayer. We didn’t plan for half of the ladder rungs to snap after the throw.
It soon became apparent — the window was out of reach. And so, in much less heroic fashion, I started chucking pebbles at the glass. The hinges creaked; the curtains flapped. A blue figure took shape in the night and only after Elif’s voice echoed, so sweet and sad, did I understand how much I’d missed her. Nothing else mattered in this moment — selling land or keeping land. I felt that I had crossed the ocean, arrived here in Klisura, for no other reason than to be with her.
And only after her voice echoed did I realize how utterly absurd this situation was. The dream that Grandpa’s stories had concocted, a dream we had both dreamed as one, was suddenly reduced to ash. I was once more awake.