“What’s wrong?” I said. I took her hand, fearful she might run away, glad she hadn’t. For a long time, she kept her eyes on the pavement. Some cobblestones beneath our feet were loose and vibrated. Someone bumped into me, into her; the crowd tossed us about like a river.
“I’m late,” she said.
At first I thought I had misheard her. I asked her to repeat and she repeated.
How late? I asked. Two weeks. No. A little over. But it had happened before — a few years back, when, to punish her father, she’d refused to eat a bite. She’d been late then, skipped two entire cycles.
We’d slipped around a corner where the sidewalk was strangely vacant. But now the sun was beating down on us, poking me in the eyes, making it really difficult to focus.
Could it be stress? I wanted to ask. Being chased out of her home, not seeing Aysha? Could it be because of my sickness?
And how? We had used protection!
Instead, I must have kept silent.
“Say something,” she begged me, no longer angry sounding.
The sun was blinding, poking, irritating. I pulled her out of its reach, under the shade of a linden tree. I cupped her hand in mine and kissed the tips of her fingers.
From the drugstore Elif had bought a pregnancy test. She’d planned to use it in the toilet at the station, in secret.
“We’ll do the test,” I told her, and took the small bag. “But home, in Klisura.”
And that, by the way she sought my embrace, seemed to please her.
* * *
We kept very quiet on the ride to the village. The driver tried a conversation, but right away Elif moved to the back of the bus and I followed. There we sat stiffly, not touching, her eyes out the window, mine straight ahead, on the plastic dice rocking from the rearview mirror, on the poster of Hristo Stoichkov, on the picture of Samantha Fox in the nude. Not that I saw them. My mind was at once in a hundred places, all cracking with static.
I had to tell myself not to clutch the bag as hard as I clutched it. To ease up a little. What would it mean if the test turned out this way and what if the other? I tried to consider the outcomes. To sense which way I was leaning. But there was too much static, my head was too dizzy, too buzzing. I didn’t know what it was that I feared. Just that I feared, wildly.
Say something, I thought. Elif needs you. Hold her hand again and kiss it. But when I tried to reach over, my muscles had turned liquid. I was paralyzed and couldn’t blink even.
“Look at them,” I said, beside myself, of Samantha Fox’s magnificent breasts. “Enormous.”
“I’d rather look at you,” Elif said. “It’s funnier that way.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “The poor woman. Think of the back pain.”
“Pinned up there, nude and cold, with no one to save her.”
“A martyr,” I said.
“A saint even.”
We burst out laughing. We snorted, choked, coughed, kept laughing with great hunger.
“What are we going to do, amerikanche?” Elif said, and wiped away the tears.
“We’ll name her Samantha. That’s what.”
This too sounded awfully funny. And I simply couldn’t believe it. A minute ago I’d been so scared, so uncertain. Along which path should I wish for the test to send us?
It was impossible now to envision a more senseless question.
PART SIX
ONE
I AWOKE CONVINCED that the turbines had begun spinning — so loud was the whoosh that had roused me. It seemed like the windows rattled. Tin cans rolled through the courtyard and a jar shattered to pieces. Then I heard crying, mad and mournful. And Grandpa calling. I’m not sure what he said exactly, his voice was too low and soothing.
Already Elif stood by the window.
“He’s throwing a fit,” she said. “The poor thing.”
And really, in the yard, Saint Kosta was raising mayhem. One moment he was atop the bench; the next he’d pushed himself off, beating his wings grotesquely. Two, three meters, then he’d plummet. He resembled a fish thrashing ashore, choking. Bare-chested, a Thracian gladiator, Grandpa tried to approach him, the shirt in his hands like a weighted net. Once he cast the shirt, but Saint Kosta dodged it, flapped his wings, screamed, and bounced to the well, where he perched, breathing heavily. Grandpa watched him, his hands spread like thin wings, and the shirt he held, billowing in the wind.
It was then that I saw the reason — thick wheels overhead, hundreds of storks spinning. They’d begun to gather. They would fly south soon.
Once again Grandpa threw his shirt at Saint Kosta, and once again he missed him. The stork spooked, lost his balance, and plunged right down the well’s mouth. Elif yelped. Grandpa ran to the well, cursing. He pulled on the rope and the pail and soon he was holding Saint Kosta and petting gently the base of his neck.
“Oh, no,” Elif said. “Here it comes. Get ready.”
She wanted her bucket. I sprinted to the hallway and brought it. It was not pretty, but it was faster this way. Each morning, her sickness seemed to get worse. As the day waned, the nausea didn’t. Five in the afternoon and she’d still be retching. “That baby,” she said sometimes, “she’s contrary like her mother.”
We believed it was a girl we were having.
“Way too early to tell, compadre,” the doctor in town had told us. We had gone to see him at Grandpa’s insistence.
Grandpa himself learned the news only moments after the test confirmed it. Elif and I walked out to the terrace. We held sweaty hands and were quite embarrassed. But on the inside we were bursting. When he saw us, Grandpa stood up.
“Old man—” I began, but he waved his cigarette shut up.
“Cut the crap,” he said. “Is it a plus or a minus? I saw the box in the toilet. A plus or a minus?”
I stuck out the stick, to prove it. Immediately he crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. He tossed the pack over the banister. He dusted off his hands, snatched the stick, and examined it closely.
“Come here,” he ordered Elif, who’d turned crimson. He gripped her cheeks and planted a kiss on her forehead. His big hand smacked me on the neck, playful-like. “Dear God,” he said. “I’m now immortal. A great-grandfather.”
He reached for the bottle of rakia—these days always on the table beside him. Then he seemed to reconsider. “We can’t trust a piece of plastic. This is serious business.”
The next day, we were in town at the doctor’s — the same one who’d saved me from the tick, the same one who’d given Grandpa the fake medical papers to delay his trial.
“Comrade teacher, you can absolutely trust this piece of plastic. But I’ll do you one better.”
The ultrasound machine, he said; his nephew had brought it from Munich. So what if a horse doctor had used it there? He let Elif lie down on the couch and Grandpa and I stepped to the side, so she could expose her stomach. The doctor squirted gel from a tube, smeared it with the transducer. Elif shrieked with the cold.
“Find me one American doctor,” he said, “who can do this better with what I’ve been given.”
He called us over and we stared at the gray screen. Some people have trouble telling this from that in an ultrasound image. I am not one of those people.
“Can you see it?” I asked Elif, and she nodded, only a small nod.
“Dear God,” Grandpa bellowed. “I too can see it.”
A tiny thing, so small to look at you’d say it was nothing. And in that nothing already a heart beating and the emptiness taking on form and flesh, purpose and meaning.