“My kazam,” Elif said. “My darling.” She set the skull aside and laid our baby upon the towel. It was a tiny thing, but already it had eyes, nubs for arms and legs, and where the brain would be — a dark spot.
Elif had expelled it that morning, after a series of painful contractions. Four days after we’d seen the doctor.
We wrapped the towel around it. We laid it gently into the soft hay.
“What about the skull?” I said.
“What about it?”
We left the skull as it was, in the nest, and we climbed down.
“Don’t look back,” Elif told me.
EIGHT
IT WAS SOMETIME IN OCTOBER when Elif said she was leaving. We were in bed, but turned away from each other. We rarely touched now and if we did, always by accident, we jumped, startled, as if we’d brushed against a furnace.
The winds had grown colder. The days shorter. And the rains had returned to the Strandja. It was raining now, very softly, and out the window the sky looked like a great sea. The clouds were its waves, driving madly away from us, away from Klisura, toward the edge of the world. That’s where the sea emptied out. It had no shores. The nothing contained it.
“I have to leave, amerikanche,” Elif said. “I can’t stay here.”
My heart understood that. But if I tried to explain it to myself I failed badly. Why couldn’t we work through all that had happened and reemerge stronger together? Why couldn’t we go to America, start a new life?
And what about Aysha? I wanted to ask her. What would she do without you? This answer too I knew already. Elif would not allow her sister to walk down the same path she herself had once taken. She would not reward the little girl’s extortions. Every night for many years Elif had begged Allah to cut the rope that tied her to Aysha. Yet Allah would not cut the rope for her, as he would not for anybody. All along, Elif understood now, she’d held a knife but had feared to use it. Now at last, she was ready. Aysha would be better off without her.
“Where will you go?” I mumbled. She took some time to think it over, though I don’t think she was deciding. She was afraid to tell me.
“Turkey,” she said. “Where else?” She turned around to face me. “American, give me some of that money. Two or three thousand.”
I brought the wad from the drawer in which we kept it. “Take it all,” I insisted.
“I can’t do that.”
“Sure you can. I’ll feel much better.”
“Amerikanche,” she said. I wiped my cheeks and tried laughing, like it was a big joke. Then something turned inside me. I almost shouted, Wait. Hear me out. Listen!
There is always suffering in life. Those before us have suffered and we too must suffer. But there is also happiness, merriment, bliss. To be alive is to hurt and to laugh, not just one or the other. To laugh after you’ve hurt, while you’re hurting, that’s a great thing. Stay with me, I wanted to tell her. Let’s learn to accept the world together.
All I managed was to mumble I loved her. By now she too was crying. “What am I going to do without you?” I said, and she didn’t answer.
* * *
That afternoon she made me cut her long hair.
“I can’t be Lada,” she said. “I can’t carry you around in my hair.”
I spread old newspapers on the floor of our room and when we were done I wrapped the locks in the paper. “Burn them,” she said, and I promised I’d do it. She knew I was lying.
Once again, she was the way I first saw her — boyish, her cheeks sharper with the short hair. But she was not at all the same now. She bore on her face some great lightness.
We spent the night in each other’s arms, crying from time to time, but saying nothing. With the dawn she kissed me. I drifted away and when I woke up it was past midday. Rain drummed on the windows. The wad of money lay untouched where I’d left it.
I heard the knocking of dice from the terrace. A silly hope seized me. I jumped out of bed, sprinted. Grandpa was rolling alone, smoking. Saint Kosta lay in his corner.
“My boy,” Grandpa said when he saw me.
I pulled up a chair, sat down, quiet. But in my mind I was already running. Through the yard, toward the ruins, out of Klisura. In my mind I was crossing the fence at the border. She couldn’t have gotten that far. With some luck I would catch her.
Then even in my mind I knew better. One night, when she’d first moved into our house, Elif had cuddled in bed beside me. “All my life,” she’d whispered, “I thought I was a rebel. In a world of fire dancers I thought I was the fire. But now I see, amerikanche, all along it’s you who’s the fire. You just don’t yet know it.”
At last, I too knew it. Fire did not return where it had passed once. Fire did not burn backward.
PART SEVEN
ONE
LOOK. SEE: NAZAR AGA, tall, terrible, rides at the head of his fifty soldiers — the new guards of the sultan, Muhammad’s Victorious Army. Tucked in his red sash — his whip, his knife, his pistol. And beside them — the grand vizier’s firman. “You are to go, Nazar Aga,” the firman orders, “to the Strandja Mountains, to the Hasekiya. You are to meet there with Salih Baba, its ruler. And when you do — you are to end them. Both the place and its ruler.”
Nazar Aga is now an old man. Yet still, he can’t ride slowly. His blood is boiling and its vapor dyes all he sees in red — the mud, the rocks and trees, the mountain. The Hasekiya, he thinks, and spits to the left of his scarlet horse. For hundreds of years the Christians there have been spared from high taxes, allowed to worship their god freely. And Salih Baba! Nazar spits to the right side. The governor who’s built for his Greek wife a Christian chapel in the middle of his konak; who’s never erected a single mosque, but with whose permission the raya is constructing churches! A Bektashi dervish, and once upon a time a leader of the janissaries.
No. Spittle is not enough for such a man. The knife is not enough. Nor is the pistol.
Nazar Aga pulls out his whip and lashes — the horse, his own leg, he pays no mind to what the whip is striking. The horse flies up the narrow pathway; the soldiers struggle to keep up. Scarlet clouds are thickening the sky and scarlet rain is falling.
“Wait for me, Salih Baba. I’m coming. And with me, I’m bringing you a sweet gift. The sultan’s will. Allah’s judgment.”
* * *
It is known that Murad I, the Godlike One, established the Ottoman Empire. He brought most of the Balkans under his rule, called himself sultan for the first time, and first instituted the devshirmeh—the recruit, the blood tribute. Every five years the strongest Christian boys were taken away from their parents, converted into the right faith, trained harshly, and so transformed into the sultan’s most faithful soldiers — the janissaries. When a janissary was ready to serve, a Bektashi dervish blessed him. It was the Bektashi order, an old and mystic brotherhood, that guided the order of the janissaries. The two entwined the way the oak and ivy do.
The centuries rolled on; the janissaries grew greedy. First they wanted more money, and when the sultan refused, they rose in arms against him. So he paid them more, and after, with each new sultan, their salary increased. As did their want — to marry, to own land, to conduct private trade. All of these privileges they were given, yet their greed remained unquenched. It turned them from servants into masters, but it also made them weak and lazy. No longer were they undefeatable in battle.