The newspapers on the table flapped and, zipping up my jacket, I stretched back in the chair. I really was tired. The wind had grown cold. The sun had dived behind the hills and though the sky was bright in that direction, it was indigo to the east. From our vantage point, high on the terrace, I could see the bridge, the river, and on the other side the Muslim houses with their red rooftops, the thin minaret of the mosque. On our side of the village was desolation — crumbling stone walls, yards overgrown with thorns and dead trees. And on the chimneys of the ruined houses — like large, unblinking eyes that watched me in the dusk — dozens of stork nests.
“Does every house have a nest?” I asked Grandpa a few days later.
“Some roofs have two.”
But why there weren’t any in the Muslim hamlet he couldn’t say.
The nests were still empty. Though it was time, the storks had not arrived yet. Two more weeks would pass before the first birds — the scouts, as Grandpa called them — spun their belated wheels in the skies over Klisura.
“What’s that?” I pointed toward the end of the village, where, as a grotesque counterpoint to the white minaret, stuck up an ugly black metal frame.
Grandpa groaned in disgust. “There is the Babel Tower,” he said, “there is the Eiffel Tower. That there is the Tower of Klisura. A world fucking wonder. If you permit.”
A few months back some genius had started building a wind turbine and then abandoned it mid-construction. And that was that.
He lit up and the plume he exhaled hung between us, changing shapes. The wind whooshed through the treetops and carried the smell of budding leaves, of wet, damp earth, which mixed with the stench of the tobacco. I cowered in my jacket. The cigarette burned red, redder in the smoke, like a living coal. The smoke drew a wing, the wing morphed into a woman’s face.
A hand shook my shoulder. “Wake up, my boy. Listen. Hear!”
How long had I dozed? Night had fallen. Somewhere in the dark, behind hills I couldn’t see, a bird was calling, its song melodic, mournful. And like today, another bird answered it from the Muslim hamlet, where now timid lights shone behind the curtained windows.
“It’s from across the border,” Grandpa said. “A man has died. They’re letting us know.”
“Who is?” I perched forward and listened to the whistling song.
“The people of his village. That’s how they cross the hills. They’ve learned to speak like birds.”
I’m not sure how long I sat in my chair mesmerized. The song had dissolved in the night and silence had returned to the village — crickets cried in the yard, dogs barked, the treetops rustled.
“This man,” I said at last, and my ugly accent startled me. What beauty, to speak unburdened like a bird. “Did you know him? Was he a good man?”
“What difference does it make?” Grandpa asked. “He’s dead.”
* * *
I woke up with thunder ringing in my ears. Sheets of rain slapped the window and the glass rattled in its frame. The whole house had come to life — walls, floors, beams in the ceiling. Caught in jet lag, I listened, dozed off, came to again. Then, sharp as the bolts of lightning that flashed over the hills, a man’s voice echoed. Someone was calling down the hall.
I turned my flashlight on and for a brief moment did not know where I was. The beam illuminated a tiny fire truck on the floor, a whipping top. A small desk in the corner and on the wall above it a map of the ancient world. My childhood room re-created piece by piece.
“I moved it here exactly as it was,” Grandpa had said a few hours earlier when he led me over the threshold. “Once I sold the apartment, I had a decision to make. I couldn’t throw you on the trash.” The tiny bed, which at the time had seemed so giant — a pirate galleon, a rocket ship — and the chair by its side, in which for nights on end Grandpa had told me goodnight stories of khans and tsars and rebels. He’d brought them here to the village.
“Grandpa!” I called now in the hallway. The voice had not echoed again, but in its place I heard the smashing of a hammer. Light flickered around the frame of his shut door. I knocked, then entered.
Grandpa was writing frantically behind a desk. The storm had thrown the windows open and banged them against the walls. A curtain flapped heavy with rain, which pounded the room with every gust. But the old man wrote unfazed. His drawers, his hemp shirt stuck drenched to his body. Sheets of paper were scattered across the desk, where a gas lamp flickered despite the storm. How he had not set the room on fire, I didn’t know. And there were yet more papers, spilled wet on the floor.
I slammed the windows shut, then laid my hand on his shoulder.
“You’re shivering,” I said. I could see my breath escape in a cloud and his breath when he stammered.
“My boy. I was just writing you a letter.”
His eyes were muddy. They darted across my face like frightened things.
Gently I helped him up and led him across the hallway to my bed. I took the drenched clothes off and rubbed his body under the thick Rhodopa blanket.
“You are that boy, aren’t you?” he muttered once. And once he said, “My boy!” Then he was quiet. He watched me terrified. I tried to calm him with gentle talk, but I was anxious, myself frightened, and so my accent had worsened. I don’t think he understood me.
Earlier that day, on our way back from the sick girl’s house, like a man who wanted to fake a careless disposition, Grandpa had started whistling a tune. The tune had sat on my tongue all day, familiar yet out of reach. But now, to my surprise, I pursed my lips and whistled, a song Grandpa had sung for me goodnight. He closed his eyes. The storm had passed. Far across the border, in Turkey, its thunder still rumbled.
The words to the song too returned. But I ignored them.
SEVEN
I WAS ON MY THIRD KNOCK AT THE GATES when, in the window overlooking the road, a curtain stirred just enough for Elif’s face to peek through. Her expression didn’t change when she saw me. The curtain fell and for a long time I shivered in the morning chill. Then the window opened, but the curtain remained drawn.
“What do you want?” she said. And after a while, “I know you’re there. I can hear you breathing.”
I focused all my faculties. I’d come to return the towels. The towels in which she’d wrapped the bread and cheese. And would she let me, allow me to use their phone?
“Look up the street,” she said. “Is there a window open?”
There was.
“And a hag hanging out the frame. Staring at you?”
She was.
“Well then, we might as well.” Her white hand parted the curtain and slammed the window shut. A minute later she was shooing me in through the gates.
“Good morning, Aunt Nadiré,” she called to the woman up the street. “Don’t tumble over and break your neck now!” And then to me, “The phone’s in the living room. When you’re done come back outside. I’ll be here, waiting.”
Sand dunes as wide as oceans and camels in long, snaking caravans. A flock of storks against a blazing sun and an oasis where men in white gowns and turbans had stopped to quench their thirst. A placid lake. A calm blue sky. I’d entered not a living room, but an entire world of magic.
Besides the murals, the room was plain. Red rugs covering the floor from wall to wall and cushions around a low rectangular table. A large chest against one wall and on the chest the phone. No TV set, no books other than a single leather-bound volume on the table.
I stuck my finger in the rotary and dialed the number on my calling card. Six times before I connected. Enter your twelve-digit PIN, the automated operator said. I turned the rotary, but by the fourth revolution the operator had asked for the PIN again. I watched the camels make their way through the desert, immense riches locked in the chests on their backs. I watched the men about to drink from the lake and wondered if it was in their power to turn tone into pulse so I could call my parents and tell them I had arrived.