“Elif,” the old man called to our guide. “Fetch me a washbasin and a knife.”
The first thing he cut with the knife was the rope. He threw the pieces to the floor in disgust. I noticed a large scorched circle, which the rugs could not hide fully, as if someone had built a fire in the middle of the room and let it burn. Sweat was pouring down my back and my throat burned thirsty. A motley rug covered the window and the sun shone muffled behind it. The yellow, the orange, the red bands glowed brightly; the others were black. Across the rug, on a nail in the wall, hung a braid of garlic.
“And how are you, kazam?” the old man asked the woman. He readjusted the rooster under his arm and, still holding the knife in the other, touched her forehead with the back of his hand.
“I’ve been burning, Grandpa.”
Gently he raised her chin to have a better look. Gently he brushed his fingers across the bruises of her cheek. “I see the imam has opened up the slap factory again,” he said.
“He worries, Grandpa. His hand is quick to slap, but he means well.”
“And where is he now?”
“Where can an imam be?”
The old man grumbled. “Let’s get this over with,” he said, and motioned me to join him by the bed. I didn’t have time to hesitate — he’d already shoved the rooster into my hands. Beside me, Elif embraced the metal basin.
We watched Aysha sleep. As if our eyes had tickled her, she stirred. Her mother followed the old man the way a hungry dog follows the butcher.
“Saint Constantine,” the old man whispered, “are there no Christian girls for you to take? Or are the Muslims sweeter? Go to the Greeks. The Greeks love you.”
He reached over and removed the tarpaulin pouch from the rooster’s head. The rooster’s chest expanded and, feeling that it wanted to flap, I gripped it tighter. Then came the crowing — so loud and piercing I almost dropped the bird.
As for the rest, what’s there to say? Aysha woke up startled and began to cry. Her feet took tiny steps in the air, and her heels knocked against the bed. The old man ordered me to hold the rooster tightly, and, eyes closed, I did. I could hear the sound the blood made splashing against the basin. The air thickened with a metallic stink. The rooster thrashed, kicked, and so did Aysha. The whole bed shook and creaked. “Vah, vah, vah,” she cried out, like the old woman at the station. Then she was still.
The old man had painted crosses of blood on her cheeks and forehead. A big, content smile stretched her burning lips. He painted crosses on her mother’s cheeks, and on Elif’s. He dipped his thumb one last time in the foamy blood and asked Elif to carry the basin out.
“Grandpa,” I said after he’d drawn a cross on my forehead. “I haven’t seen you in fifteen years and this is how you greet me?”
He called the mother over. He said, “This is my boy, my grandson from America. The one who never calls.”
“Oh, please,” I started to say, but now was hardly the time for confrontation. The woman smiled. She lowered the rug and pushed the window open. At the ledge, I filled my lungs with fresh air, gulped it like water. I let the sun above the hills burn itself upon my pupils and listened to the wind in the treetops. The imam began to sing from the mosque.
Most likely the old man was right. How odd this whole situation seemed to me now. How bizarre that after fifteen years, I would meet my grandfather without an official moment of recognition, without an affectionate embrace to mark the instant of my return. And then I understood that we reunited the way we’d drifted apart — gradually, over time; that I returned the way I’d left.
SIX
MORE THAN FORTY YEARS AGO, as a punishment for his scandalous membership resignation, the Bulgarian Communist Party had exiled my grandfather to the village of Klisura. A schoolteacher, he had taught the Klisuran children for four years before returning to civilization. This was all I knew, all I had learned from my father.
To claim that Grandpa despised the Communist Party would be an understatement of great proportions. And yet he never showed his contempt. To say that he expressed joy when the Party fell would also be inaccurate. “The wolves have retailored their coats,” he once said, regarding the new democratic leaders. “Woe to the lamb who thinks the wolf his guard dog.” In short, Grandpa claimed to give the Communists no thought at all. He wished for them what he considered the ultimate curse — the Cup of Lethe. “May no one remember them in fifty years,” he told me once, during my senior year in high school. I was writing a paper on Communism and he had shut down my request for help. “May their children forget them. I certainly have.”
But wasn’t short historical memory a dangerous thing? I asked him.
“You muttonhead,” he said. “People don’t write history books so others can learn from their mistakes. They write them so they will be remembered. And I for one will not remember.” For years I was convinced that his animosity toward the Party stemmed from the fact that in 1944, along with the reins of Bulgaria, the Communists had seized our family land. But when, upon Grandpa’s sudden disappearance from our lives three years ago, my father spoke of Klisura, I realized that the old man’s hatred must stem from some deeper, darker place. I decided that Grandpa’s punitive exile to the Strandja Mountains had brought him much suffering and pain. But if I was correct, why had he returned?
“You had no right to disappear like that,” I said. We were eating dinner on the covered terrace of his Klisuran house, some bread and cheese Elif had given us on the way out. Silently we had crossed the bridge, the small square. Silently we had followed the eroded cobblestone road. Every now and then Grandpa would pinch the scruff of my neck.
“Look how you’ve grown,” he’d say. “Had I known you were coming, instead of a rooster, I might have bought a lamb.” Then he’d tousle my hair as if such playfulness could mask the truth — neither I nor he knew where to begin. And yet we had to, somewhere.
“We were worried sick. We thought you were dead.”
He shook the crumbs from his sleeves. “Good bread, this,” he said. He reached for his jar and for a long time gulped water. Then he picked on the crumbs stuck to its sweaty walls.
“Grandpa,” I said. He pushed the jar away and the newspapers we’d spread on the table rustled.
“Quite frankly, Grandson, I didn’t think you’d notice.”
I begged his pardon.
“Beg all you want,” he said. “For all I know, you have no grandfather. You certainly acted it for years.”
“I was busy with school. Preoccupied. But I always made time to call you.”
“My erections are more frequent than your calls.”
What very useful information, I said. I asked him if it was daily reports he expected. He asked me to repeat myself.
“This mumbling,” he scowled, “this so-called Bulgarian of yours. It’s pitiful.”
He’d dealt me a low blow. I bit my tongue, then chewed it as if it were to blame. All the accusations, the powerful, dramatic speeches I’d been preparing for months rang perfectly clear in my head even now. But the moment I opened my mouth the words rolled out crippled.
Grandpa picked up the jar and drank it dry. “I’m thirsty like a rabid dog,” he said. “And maybe I am rabid. Maybe that’s why I came here. Did you think of that?”
I nodded. Insane, unstable, terminally ill — all these were scenarios my parents and I had considered at length.
“Listen, my boy,” Grandpa said gently, and spread his palms open. “We’re both tired. We’ll talk tomorrow.”