This Lenio sang as many songs, strumming the mandolin out on the terrace.
It’s where I’m sitting now so many years later. Perhaps the time has come for me to sing her story. Or rather, to bring it to an end.
TWO
A WAVE OF QUIET OUTRAGE swept Klisura once people learned the news — the teacher had snuck across the border and stolen Captain Vangelis’s daughter. Within a month, there was the wedding — not in the church, but in the school yard, by the well, under the trellis white with snow. That’s where Father Dionysus held the service. Few villagers attended. The mayor too refused to go. “Don’t ask me, my boy,” he told Grandpa. “I can’t.” Nor could he legalize the marriage. After all, Lenio had crossed into Bulgaria in secret.
Then Lenio began to show. And for Klisurans all was clear. That’s why the teacher had stolen her. That’s why he’d married her outside the church. And they were right — except, the baby wasn’t Grandpa’s. The rest was true. He’d saved Lenio from the Greeks and when, one night in Klisura, she had cried inconsolably — that she was disgraced, that her life was over, that she would die alone — he’d taken pity and said, “Don’t cry. I’ll take you as my wife.”
After this, Lenio stayed with Grandpa in the school. He slept in his room, she in the room that later would be mine. He taught her Bulgarian; she taught him Greek. In the evenings, she played the mandolin, sang him songs, and showed him how to whistle like a bird. So what if he was much older, if she was pregnant with someone else’s child? Weren’t they married before God, living under the same roof?
One February night — it was a vicious winter — Grandpa awoke with Lenio’s face on his chest. “Don’t cry,” he said, a tired, old refrain, and kissed her. He was afraid she’d run away, but instead, she kissed him back. And after this, they slept together in the bed and often he told her stories of where he’d take her once spring arrived.
Of course he knew the Party wouldn’t let him leave Klisura. Of course, in the daytime, Lenio herself refused to go elsewhere. She said the mountain held her in its fist. Saint Kosta held her. But late at night, in dreams, they traveled freely, away from parties, mountains, saints.
The baby was born when May was rolling to an end. They named him Kostadin. Then Grandpa had to leave. “You are the vekilin now,” the mayor told him. “You have a ritual to oversee. Pack up. We’re going to the Greeks.”
And so they went. Captain Vangelis met them in his yard, wined them, dined them. Not once did he approach Grandpa with talk of his stolen daughter. Not once did Lenio’s brothers give him a vile look. Even Michalis, whom Lenio had been supposed to wed, spoke to Grandpa with the respect his caretaking role demanded. On parting, once the dance was over, the local women kissed his hands.
Is it really this easy? Grandpa wondered. Is all forgiven? All forgotten?
Alas, it was not.
THREE
I HAD DOZED OFF on the terrace, wrapped in my blanket, as I often did. Saint Kosta lay at my feet and when he stirred I woke up. A mandolin was twanging below us, deep in the bowels of the house.
Soon Grandpa emerged from the old classroom, the Cremona in his hands. Without a word, he laid it on the table, replaced the strings with the ones I’d bought him in Burgas, and set about tuning them by ear.
November. Winter in the Strandja. The days were short; the nights were dark and lonely. A new, sharp kind of gust was polishing the snow into an icy crust. It swept the roads, the hills, it beat the blades of the unmoving turbines. It no longer bothered me that no one was switching them on. Nothing bothered me these days.
Each morning we rose with the sun, and while Grandpa boiled tea I cleaned Saint Kosta’s corner. He lived with us, inside the house, a skinny, sickly thing we feared wouldn’t see the spring. Not only had his wing healed crooked, but somehow he’d developed a pitiful limp in his leg. We were all pitiful. If Grandpa said let’s eat, we ate. If he said let’s walk, we walked. We visited Baba Mina and Dyado Dacho; we stopped by the café. But if Grandpa said nothing, if he took the chair beside me, I too kept quiet in my chair. If he didn’t eat, I didn’t eat. If he didn’t walk, I didn’t walk.
This apathy seemed like a decent bargain: I didn’t suffer. Nor was I merry.
“No,” Grandpa said sometimes. “Laugh. Cry. But do something. That’s life. Yours isn’t.”
“Yet here I am,” I’d say, and he would tell me: “My boy, you’re anywhere but here.”
I guess I was. I really couldn’t tell. Ever since Elif had run away, I’d lost my sense of position, both in time and in space.
“I look at you,” Grandpa would say, “and see myself. I can’t stand what I’m seeing. And this stork, watching me, judging me. It’s too much to take!”
So one night he brought out the old mandolin. His fingers grew more assured with each new day, but I never made a comment. November passed. December came. I sat as quiet as a man can sit. And then, one evening on the terrace Grandpa spoke.
“By the end, the mayor couldn’t stand me. He hated my guts. But what could he do? I was the Party. The priest was the Party. So the mayor did as we told him and let us carry out what we were sent to do.”
Two years after Grandpa and Father Dionysus first set foot in Klisura, the Party started changing all Muslim names. In the end, it was not a campaign that succeeded, but they’d try again a few decades later. I knew how the priest had been baptizing people left and right. But Grandpa had kept his own involvement a secret. As a teacher, he made sure the children of Klisura learned their А, Б, В. He taught them they were Bulgarians, not Turks. That’s why the Party had sent him and the Pope there — to get things ready for what much later they’d call the Process of Rebirth.
It had all started with Grandpa, still a teacher in Pleven. He liked to tell his students stories. Of his days as a partisan fighter. Of how he’d hid in a dugout and how, dizzy with hunger, he’d raided the sheep pens, the dairy farms with his comrades. But word got around and the principal called him to his office. “The regional governor has heard of your stories. He doesn’t like them.”
“What’s not to like?” Grandpa asked him.
“What, what! You can’t be telling our children the partisans were thieving food.”
“But we were thieving,” Grandpa said, laughing. “You were thieving, the regional governor was thieving.”
“Sure we were. But that’s not the point. The point is the regional wants to set an example.”
“All right,” Grandpa said. “I’ll talk to him myself.”
A huge office. A secretary. Freshly lacquered paneling on the walls. A massive desk. Behind the desk — Grandpa’s cousin, the regional governor.
“Listen, cousin,” Grandpa told him. “What’s this talk I hear, you want to punish me?”
“You’re dirtying the Party’s name,” the regional said. “We’re cousins and people are watching. I can’t be giving you preferential treatment. I need to maintain a clean face.”
So Grandpa told him, “You weren’t worried for your face in the dugout. And when that boy with the kalushari fell with a dagger in his chest, it wasn’t for your face you worried.”
The regional turned as pale as fresh cheese. “Leave!” he shouted. “Out of my office!”
The next day, the principal summoned Grandpa again. “Pack your bags. You’re leaving for Klisura.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then Belene. The work camp.”